Bedlam
by crinklescofftrip
Summary: Civilian holidays are silly little things, all packed with traditions and noise. Particularly noise, where the Akatsuki is concerned. KisaIta WARNING! SEX!
1. 1 6

Sex, in Uchiha Itachi's opinion, had the nasty tendency of leading to problems. He'd arrived at that decision abruptly in the doorway of the Akatsuki kitchen, exactly twenty-five minutes before his current situation. Before that, his thoughts on it had been much more reasonable: sex was nice, like a hobby that one dabbled in from time to time when the mood struck. That particular opinion had been reached carefully over the better part of ten years, starting at the time of his initiation to the Akatsuki and ending on his twentieth birthday. It had been unchallenged ever since, right up until the new one took its place.

He had made a point to put off coming to an overall decision on what he thought of the thing that was actively controlling the lives of countless men and women all across the elemental countries and beyond for as long as possible. He had had ideas about it when he left his village at age thirteen, picked up from what he read and what he heard from rowdy peers in the ANBU locker room. And then at age fourteen, he had begun trying it. A first hand experience, after all, out weighed a dirty romance story written by a drooling hermit with a desperate need for creative writing lessons. There wasn't even a comparison.

He'd tried to go into each experience with an open mind when he began approaching suitable partners. It went without saying that his final decision could have a vital effect on his future—if he decided that maybe the sharingan was worth preserving _after all. _The women that he chose were usually met along the way between one mission location and another. Waitresses were the most common, some pretty, some just pleasant enough in conversation to tip interest in her favor. But always, they were forgettable, regardless of residence, appearance, or blarney, and out of his mind when he set out in the morning with Kisame.

From his reading material, he knew that the term "one-night-stand" applied.

There were only two instances when Itachi encountered problems with the morning part. Both were during the early months of his experimentation, when he discovered a tidbit of useful information that his novels hadn't warned him about in regards to young girls. It was from those experiences, when he was confronted with enough puffy eyes and trembling lips to set Konoha's favorite novel writer to shame, that he learned two things. One, that for his particular interest, he preferred his partners old enough to avoid unclear messages and bouts of uncalled for sobbing. The other was that in some cases, it was better to leave _before _morning, if possible.

Kisame, for all his banter during their work, had quietly pretended not to notice when Itachi began disappearing at rest points. Itachi suspected that it was a chosen ignorance rather than an actual one, given how easily his absences were excused. At one point, Itachi was even sure he caught the shark nin grinning behind his palm before he slipped away from their table. But as much as Itachi was sure that his partner knew exactly what he was doing since the first night he went so far as to smile at a bosomy hostess in the Snow Country, he was equally convinced that his last influential experiment went entirely unnoticed by Kisame, or anyone else. He had been fifteen when he made his last leap into unknown territory, which was quickly followed by a crash landing that put him in place to reach his previous judgment on sexual interaction as a whole. He had been base stationed with Kisame and two other comrades at the time, in mid December. And after having too much of what he would later realize through his shark-like comrade's playful teasing, had been _alcoholic_ eggnog, he let some things happen that he might not have considered doing had he been sober. And given the amount of alcohol he suspected must have been in his partner's system at the time, he couldn't have been sure if the other would have either. The two other ninja who had been base stationed with them at the time had already gone to bed by the time it happened, one because of exhaustion and the other possibly from realizing what his two comrades were eventually planning to do and choosing to disappear beforehand. And the next morning, Itachi had felt a sincere pang of sympathy for the two young girls he left feeling guilty and confused during the clumsy first year of his experimentation. However, unlike those girls, his partner had not been a beginner, and had already learned the rule about what to do with drunken virgin morning-afters, and by the time that Itachi had woken up in the wrong bedroom, sore, groggy, and feeling a vague sense of guilt over two women whose names he couldn't even remember, Orochimaru was already well on his way to the Wind Country with Sasori for a mission that kept him safely away for months.

Luckily, Itachi's limited emotional attachment to Orochimaru had helped to restrain some of the rage he _might_ have been tempted to feel when factoring homosexuality into his overall decision on what should be made of sex all together. His opinion of it had finally been drafted and sealed in his mind five years later, and so had remained confidently ever since. That was, until new information caused his judgment to be revoked.

"So, let me get this straight," the Leader said sharply, fingers interlaced on the polished wooden surface of his desk, "you're saying that you accidentally _stabbed _your partner?"

From his own side of the desk, Itachi glanced soundlessly at the golden-red tinsel piped edges of a shelf above the Leader's head. Maybe it was coincidence that Itachi's judgment recall came on the anniversary of that night he was well beyond grueling over, or perhaps it was just by a decidedly unlucky chance.

"Do you know how much canceling your mission would _cost?"_

Every Akatsuki member, even Tobi with his questionable attention span, had an inkling about the Leader's customary mood around the civilian winter holidays, ever since the year that Kakuzu had dragged his partner back to the base only a few days short of setting out, due to an incident involving Hidan and a large group of passionate, but benevolent, carolers on the River Country border. The exact train of events was not particularly known to Itachi, having joined the organization several weeks after the alleged incident that made Kakuzu turn back from that uncompleted mission, but he was observant enough to notice the drop in the Leader's patience level and respond accordingly. There was a reason that no one wanted to stay at the base over Christmas Eve, even if the details weren't common knowledge to all of the Akatsuki members.

While Itachi was contemplating the tinsel, and wisely waiting for the subtle tone change that would signal a safe invitation to speak, the organization founder was reaching for a small hand-drawn chart laid out on his desk with the names of the three Akatsuki partner teams currently waiting somewhere inside the base halls for instructions—one team that was scheduled to leave, one to remain for another month, and one that was just checking in. The Leader glanced up after a second to check with the clock mounted on the wall across from his desk, then shook his head. "You were supposed to leave for the Tea Country in _three hours_," he said, and with the _faintest _suggestion of weariness laid into the last words along with the irritation, like an aggravated sigh.

That was the sign. Itachi opened his mouth.

"And no, I can't send you on it alone," the Leader snapped quickly, as if reading his agent's thoughts. Beside the chart, another short stack of papers sat waiting. Hidan had once said that the Leader's office looked like he was setting himself up to be a kage. At times, Itachi agreed with him. On the Leader's desk, there was an organized army of papers sorted into rows like soldiers ready for battle, summarizing the status of his eight agents and their current missions. Within reach of his chair, the Leader had had a furnace put in specifically for the sake of disposing of those papers once their necessity was gone, maintaining the secrecy demanded by the organization (and probably providing extra warmth when the base heating system broke down). Skimming the summery of the mission that Kisame and Itachi were supposed to have been preparing for, the Leader explained still a bit less than gently, "The distance is too far. If your eyes were to start acting up, we would have no way of getting back up to you, especially not with who we currently have here." He glanced down at the chart again, and then made a mark on the page with his pen. "And even if that weren't the case, this mission required Kisame's brawn."

"I see." Itachi chose to maintain a soft voice level.

"Good." Setting down his pen, the Leader looked back up at Itachi. His fingers re-laced themselves over the one clear spot on his desk. "Now, please explain to me exactly how an s-ranked shinobi can _accidentally_ stab someone?"

Itachi was quiet again for a moment; however, this time he couldn't honestly credit it to a signal in his superior's voice. Keeping his eyes focused diligently on the Leader's face (the nose if not the eyes) he took a breath, and then said as non-reluctantly as he could, "The knife slipped."

There were very few people in Itachi's acquaintance who would ask him why he chose to stab someone, and even fewer who would expect an honest answer. However, the man that Itachi was standing in front of at the moment was the one person who had the power to demand that exactly, made worse by the fact that thanks to a certain comrade and his unfailing preaching nature and impaired sense of judgment, that person was currently tensed to the point of snapping the desk in front of him in half at the first sign of yuletide-related problems.

One of the Leader's eyebrows arched dangerously as he waited for Itachi to go on.

The Fire Country runaway's eyes found their way back to the tinsel again, pausing to phrase an answer and ignoring the heat in his face that he would have liked to fight back.

Exactly forty-five minutes ago, Itachi had been peacefully chopping vegetables in the base kitchen, no thoughts of the Leader's ironically seasonal office decor or maiming his partner in mind. Simply preparing for dinner, that was all. In the Akatsuki, there was a systematic assigning of chores for the four shinobi that were base stationed to keep their lair from falling into ruin while the Leader pushed busily away at his never-ending tide of papers. It was only recently that a problem had come up with the Leader's planning, which now had him assigning to a solo agent who, until the death a certain other agent, had not actually been solo. Zetsu had the Leader's schedule, with its now unreasonable amount of housework, at a loss. It was supposed to have been Zetsu's turn in the kitchen, as well as cleaning toilets, disposing of trash, grocery shopping, and pulling out the hairs stuck to the Leader's comb. In the past, when Tobi was almost constantly circling the Grass ninja for attention, there had never been a problem. But, as if Sasori were throwing a wrench into the finely tuned mechanics of the Leader's order from beyond the grave, the balance was destroyed. By an unspoken agreement, Itachi and Kisame had began taking on some of the extra chores to help until their Leader found a new way to handle Zetsu's base stationed periods. Tonight it had been with the cooking. Itachi suspected that Kisame might have stepped in before to nudge their green comrade along to keep them from eating raw meat on more than one night.

Before Itachi's view on sex was torn away, Kisame had been buying groceries in the village, while Itachi, staying behind so that incase their leafy comrade found his way into the kitchen there would be someone ready to herd him back out in the direction of the agents' bathroom and the Leader's bathroom, had begun preparations with what was already at their disposal. Carrots, onions, peppers... However, his knife had been dull, and so he'd gotten up to sharpen it. Easy, save for the fact that the sharpener in the kitchen seemed to have disappeared. Itachi had spent a several minutes looking for it in the drawers, and wondered whether he ought to ask Zetsu before pushing the idea away impulsively. Then, naturally, he went to find the one he used for work. A kunai and a butcher's knife did have notably different shapes, true, but overall the substitute had worked just fine. But it did make the knife rather dirty, which is what led to the incident that had him standing in the Leader's office a matter of minutes later, eyes on the tinsel and wondering how he was going to explain why his partner was getting stitches put in upstairs.

He had passed Kisame in the kitchen doorway on his way back from their room. He'd turned his head in passing to ask one small question that he never got an answer to:

"Where is the soap?"

It was a simple question. A _very _simple question, particularly for someone who had been reining Zetsu in from licking the juice off the raw meat packaging for the past month. Kisame could have answered it without thinking, Itachi was sure. But when the shark nin turned his head, he froze, staring as if the Samehada had just stood up and spoken to him. Respondingly, Itachi had paused to frown and wait for an answer, but then a hand had landed on his shoulder, and without a word, his opinion on intimacy, sex, and everything that took place on Christmas Eve six years ago was ripped away and roasted alive when every hormone in his body ignited in one abrupt, startled moment.

But even with that, Itachi might have been able to snatch back enough composure to protest, could have asked Kisame what the _hell _he thought he was doing, had the part of him under assault not happened to have been the same one needed for speech. Instead, he had stood mutely still, thought process slowing to a screeching halt, while a radiating warmth slowly crept into in his stomach and settled there. He'd only registered dumbly, that his head was tipping back as if on autopilot after Kisame's fingertips moved up to land lightly on the side of his throat, and that yes, that was Kisame's other hand on the nape of his neck; yes, those were his teeth; yes, that was his tongue playing with his upper lip...

"Hey guys! Merry Christmas, _un!_"

...And yes, that was Deidara's voice snapping like a whip into the hallway. Simultaneously, when Itachi heard the sudden cheerful greeting from down the hall, he felt Kisame's body become rigid. A moment later, it was followed by the shark nin's weight pressing down on his shoulder, and Itachi was very certain that he heard a muffled curse by his ear. It took Deidara all of fifteen seconds to run down the hall toward them, five of which was spent standing wide eyed and staring at a spot on the floor near their feet. It took Itachi a little longer to react while his brain revived itself. Deidara was latching a blue arm around his shoulders before Itachi, mouth still open to a small slit, regained coherency. Blinking, he'd looked at Kisame, then Deidara, whose head was bobbing up and down and asking something about walking and bleeding, and what was wrong with Itachi.

And to himself, Itachi could only think that a second ago, he could have _sworn _he was holding a knife.

To the Leader, still waiting with his eyebrow quirked and that expression on his face that warned he was the man who could make Kakuzu burn down a bank if he wanted to,Itachi made his voice flat and tried to keep himself from looking back up at the colorful plastic decorations, as he said, "He startled me."

"Startled?" the Leader echoed. Another paper was picked up from the stacks on his desk, and with a glance down he pressed further with, "Funny, Deidara's report doesn't mention that."

Itachi resisted the urge to flair at the mocking comment. Don't get annoyed… Even if Deidara had scribbled that report when they came in together only a few minutes ago. Instead of pointing that out, Itachi said calmly, "Deidara was standing _behind _Kisame."

"I see." The Leader idly set the paper down on the clear portion of his desk. "He managed to get a good view of the injury though." The Leader flicked his line of sight toward the chart, laying across two stacks of papers to his right, then to another open file next to it that appeared to be a map with the location of Kisame and Itachi's former mission, among other locations where other agents were supposedly stationed, all circled in red. "You _had_ to stab him in the foot?"

Itachi, after making eye contact to make sure that the need for an answer was no longer as urgent as it was a few moments ago, pointedly looked to the side. Hidan, unreasonable as his religious convictions were, was expected to cause trouble on this holiday. The circled area over two regions away from the River Country was a testament to the fact that it was now all but considered in his contract after the _incident_ that the Leader was so sore about. Itachi, on the other hand, was not meant to ever come remotely close to being the target of the fiery yuletide rage that could make Deidara, raving from the sight of blood so close to dinner time, clap all three of his mouths shut on a word. Arguing that he was hardly the person who attacked first was not a good idea. Itachi stayed silent.

The Leader turned back to reading Deidara's report. Still standing in the same place across from him that he had been for the last half hour, Itachi could see the bright eyes skimming swiftly across the page, then stop suddenly when they came to something that made him look up with his eyebrow quirked again. "…Was it really standing straight up?"

Provoking by scoffing at the accuracy of a theatrical comrade's commentary was not a good idea either, Itachi decided when his head almost tipped to the side to deliver a_ look_ at the Leader's last attempt to prod him for details.

Finally, the Leader set the report aside. Dark gloved fingers laced together once again over the little spot of empty space on his desk top. With an authoritative tone, the Leader delivered, "Tell Zetsu that I want him to be ready to leave by midnight. I suspect that our spy in the Tea Country may be planning to turn on us. If this is the case, his methods may be better suited for...disposal."

"Yes, Leader-sama." Itachi nodded his head.

"Also," the Leader went on, "until further notice, both you and Hoshigaki are to remain here. Depending on how long it will take for our medic to return from the Fire Country, you may be immobile for sometime."

"...Understood."

"Dismissed."

After bowing his head again briefly, Itachi turned to go.

"And, Itachi," the Leader's voice cut in one more time, when he had one foot in the hallway. Itachi looked back over his shoulder, face carefully blank as he waited for one last detail to convey to his comrades.

"Next time, please try to avoid the mistletoe."

kkkkkkkkkkkk

After the door clicked shut behind the former heir to the Uchiha clan, the Leader finally let his shoulders slump as he pushed down a groan. Gently, already leaning back into his chair, he pressed his fingertips to the side of his head. This really wasn't a good week for Itachi to stab his partner. The decidedly non-platonic flush to Itachi's skin when he came in with Deidara babbling behind him had been far from unnoticed, likewise his hesitance to talk about what had caused it. It wasn't that hard for him to put together a guess as to what led to where, but at the moment the state of his agent's sexuality was nowhere near the most important topic on his list of possible organization conflicts. Not since the year of _the incident that shall never, ever be spoken of_ had he had a Christmas that looked so unreasonably irritating sitting squarely in his future without any signs of compromise in sight.

Sighing, he picked up Deidara's scribbled digest of the event and threw it into the trash can under his desk, which he made a mental note to light the contents of later that evening. The chart listing the schedules for his base station periods, he relocated to another corner of his desk to be adjusted later in the evening. If Itachi and Kisame were going to take over the remainder of Zetsu's base period, he was going to have to find a way to have their missions completed by other agents, even if that meant eventually sending word to Kakuzu to risk bringing Hidan back into Christian populated areas. Tobi wasn't going to be happy when he heard about this. _He _wasn't happy to order it, but Kisame and Itachi were one of his better teams and that meant assigning them a good number of the mission requests that came in.

Pulling open a drawer on the right-hand side of his desk, the Leader pulled out yet another file and laid it out on the free space of his desk. Scribbling a note, he clipped it to the inside flap, then on a second thought, made another note about possible friction coming up in Kisame and Itachi's partnership later to add to their file when he had the chance. Next, closing that and setting down his pen, he reached back into the drawer with his free hand, shuffling sightlessly around the odd objects until he found one that he had already memorized by touch over the months since Sasori's passing and the installment of his replacement agent. He leaned back into his chair again while he unscrewed the cap, shaking out and swallowing two small white capsules.

Sweet headache relief...

Even a glance at the folder, comically marked with the code name "Team 1i" was enough to make the Leader's head throb like it hadn't since _that one time he will not think about_. Tobi and Deidara, the Leader thought, just might live to out do Hidan and Kakuzu on the Dysfunctional Partners Ladder. Really, he had been counting on Zetsu's staying with them over the holiday... But, upstairs, probably even while the Leader was contemplating whether he could possible build a barricade over his office door with the papers he had stacked around the room that might possibly withstand Deidara's clay, Itachi was walking down the hall on his way to inform Zetsu of his new assignment, completely unaware of how much he was going to regret the former Grass Nin's absence in the hours to come.


	2. 2 6

One thing that all civilians, regardless of where they are from, what they believe, or how they choose to express those beliefs, have in common is an inherent zeal for celebration. Holidays are the festive offshoot of that inescapable urge coupled with the morals of their culture and religion, both of which, Kisame was _convinced_ were strategically thought out by the world leaders during the Great Shinobi Wars to scare away foreign tourists. But since crackpot theories, though not exactly shunned in the Akatsuki by common rule, were rarely seen as a positive attribute for anyone's character, the Mist Country exile had forced himself to conform to the much more common, and reasonable, explanation that societies were just _different. _And while children learning about diversity and understanding in school might think that was all well and good, Kisame knew that when select members of those different societies were brought together, each of different ages, beliefs, and mental status, it made for at least two or three crazy nights a year. Thus far, Kisame had spent three Christmas Eves stationed at the base with his brilliant, eccentric comrades. The first of which had been...enough to make Kisame sincerely grateful that he had never so much as heard Kakuzu or Hidan's name during December ever since. It wasn't that he didn't like Hidan or Kakuzu, he simply thought that there was something wrong if one had to slit their partner's throat, tape a bag over their head, and drag them nearly halfway across the country to keep them from generating into a murderous, raving hysteric upon hearing the lyrics to "Silent Night". And on some level, there might have been a little left over horror from the moment Kisame opened the door for his still-new comrades contributing to his aversion, particularly since at the time Kisame hadn't been aware of Hidan's unique survival abilities.

The first Christmas Eve after Itachi joined the organization had been spent with Orochimaru and Sasori. In comparison to the last one that Kisame had spent there, it had by all accounts been tame. Regardless of the communal hate toward Orochimaru that had later become an unofficial mandatory trait for the organization members, that Christmas spent with the snake sannin had been the closest one to fun that Kisame had witnessed so far. In Konoha, Kiri, and Suna the religion that the holiday was associated with was less than widely practiced, but Kisame thought that it was probably better that way. A lack of spiritual notions only made mixing their cultural views on the holiday all the easier. Orochimaru, a self proclaimed scientist out to hold off meeting whoever had the poor moral judgment to make him, and Sasori, who was in the habit of manipulating human corpses to make long-lasting weapons, were probably just as relieved to have team Couldn't-Kill-Us-if-You-Tried three countries over and out of Hidan's shouting distance, as Kisame was. Some years later, the third Christmas had gone less peacefully, again spent with the same team, though by then Orochimaru had been replaced with a much more animated individual who had a harder time breaking away from old cultural traditions. Kisame and Itachi had both been shaken out of bed when the base alarm system was set off by a group of civilian villagers who had been drawn into the forest by a peculiar lights display, one of whom had apparently managed to peel off one of the four paper seals locking the base entrance. The thirty odd hours that followed had been spent chasing down the jutsu-induced clones and manipulating the memories of villagers to forget why some of them had woken up to find themselves broken, bruised, and missing a number of teeth. Kisame had been exhausted by the time the last villager was found and sent back to civilization. He had also been mildly surprised that Itachi, with his eyes being their key instrument in blocking out the memories, hadn't passed out by midday. Deidara and Sasori had spent most of the day afterward locked in the Leader's office, with Sasori testifying that yes, Deidara had mentioned that Iwa annually celebrated Christmas with fireworks; yes, he had done so in the past; and no, he did not think that his partner was stupid enough to set them off over the base.

In the present, Kisame wasn't sure whether to say that his latest Christmas Eve spent within the stony walls of the Akatsuki lair was following the same pattern as his last. Zetsu was just tying off the end of a bandage on his right foot and telling him that there were painkillers _somewhere_ in base that he should take later, once he found out where. Kisame nodded along politely, listening, though barely half of what the man was saying was made it through with the memory of the last hour inwardly replaying in the shark nin's mind as he debated whether this Christmas was to be counted as good or bad. Pondering the events in reverse, from being made to lay down on his bed over what was at best a minor injury, half carried down the hall, hearing Deidara's greeting in the kitchen doorway, feeling Itachi's head tip invitingly back...

"Kisame?"

Kisame blinked when the green leaf that he had been idly staring at turned toward him. Bright golden eyes gazed back at him as Zetsu delivered a look that, though neither half of his face had eyebrows, gave the impression that if he did one would be quirked. "You were smiling," the other ninja said when Kisame angled his own head to the side, with a slight tone that Kisame had learned over the years was a noncommittal way of making a statement into an inquiry.

"Oh."

From Zetsu's viewpoint, Kisame could understand that there didn't seemed to be very much for him to smile about, particularly since he had just spent the last half hour getting a knife pulled out of his foot and listening to Deidara phrase and rephrase exactly how it had happened until Zetsu announced that he would appreciate it if Deidara would kindly wait outside if he was the one who was going to have to do the stitches. And then there had been the messy process of _getting_ the stitches...

"You're lucky that Itachi sharpened his knife, it would have caused more bleeding otherwise," Zetsu intoned in his clear, neutral voice. Zetsu was the easiest member of the organization to call stoic, Kisame thought personally, if only because of the difficulty that his facial coloring added to deciphering his emotions. Itachi was easier to read, and Kisame of all people would know that his partner was hard to beat in that arena. Not that he minded that trait in Zetsu. After all, one does not spend years living with the runner up for most stoic without developing a tolerance for quiet characters.

To his comment, Kisame lay back further on his pillow and said snidely, "I'll make sure to thank him next time we talk."

The corner of the mouth on the lighter side of Zetsu's face looked like it might have quirked a smile for a moment before the former Grass Village ninja turned his head, and Kisame was staring at the side of one large leaf-like appendage while his comrade began gathering up the contents of the medic kit he'd brought with him.

"You know, I didn't think that you were any good with medical stuff before," Kisame went on casually, making conversation while Zetsu gather the materials scattered at the foot of his bed. The needle, the thread, the iodine, the bandages...

"Tobi...provides many opportunities to practice," Zetsu answered, voice still level. Kisame chuckled anyway.

"Should have guessed," Kisame said, then noticing something that hadn't seemed strange earlier, "Where is Tobi?"

Having gotten used to seeing Zetsu alone, he hadn't noticed at first that the notoriously clingy scout wasn't with him now, after returning from his mission with Deidara.

"Taking a shower, we think," the Grass shinobi said, loading in the last wound roll of white tape into the first aid box and letting it sit on his lap while he looked back at Kisame again. "We were talking to him about his personal hygiene when Deidara came to get us."

"I see..." Kisame said, though he wasn't able to completely repress the impulse to raise an eyebrow at the side of the Grass nin's head. "Is there a _reason?_"

"He smelled terrible. Do you think Deidara is giving him enough time to take care of himself while they're traveling?" Zetsu's oddly bright eyes fastened unblinkingly on Kisame, presumably for an honest estimation.

The shark nin shifted his weight from a hard pillow onto a softer one. "I don't know... Where is Deidara, for that matter?"

**"Probably setting up traps outside the bathroom door,"** Zetsu said without breaking his tone.

_"What?"_

"Hm?"

A full minute went by with Kisame only staring at his leafy comrade, wonder if it was worth asking if Zetsu was serious, before a loud noise from outside the room took away the opportunity. A loud, banging crash, followed by the tingling of jingle bells hitting against something hard. Then, instead of asking what was probably the more important question Deidara, he was replacing it with, "What was that?"

Zetsu, head and freakishly light eyes already turned away to look at the door impulsively after the crash, as if he could see through the wall as easily as he could pass through it, exhaled, "Someone knocked over our wreath."

kkkkkkkkk

Itachi had quickly set out for the dormitory hall after leaving the Leader's office on the lower level of the Akatsuki lair. Zetsu was probably in _one_ of the rooms, being circled by the wind-like bustle of unfocused energy known as Tobi. He had been mildly annoyed when he found Zetsu's room empty after several knocks. The Grass nin was probably toiling away at one of his chores—which Itachi made a note to remember, were soon to be _his _chores, thanks to the timing of a certain loud comrade. However, Itachi's irritation was only mildly tied to his plant-like comrade's whereabouts. Zetsu's bedroom was at the opposite end of the hall from the stairs leading down to where the Leader's office was hidden within the winding tunnels of their base, and the closest to the ones leading up to the entrance level. Itachi supposed that this arrangement had been put together because Zetsu's particular method of getting around unnoticed gave him the best advantage of preventing break-ins, should anyone manage to get past the numerous traps set in the surrounding area. However, Zetsu's room was also just around the corner from the kitchen, and when Itachi turned to go back down the hall to look for Zetsu in the second most likely room, he couldn't help his eyes skimming momentarily down the other corridor, where he was just barely able to see a small slice of the kitchen door before walking on.

Itachi didn't know why Christmas was even celebrated in the Akatsuki. He couldn't think of a single member who practiced the religion. But even so, someone had apparently gone to the trouble of decorating for it. Marching down the hallway, he couldn't miss the seasonal touches littering the wall space between doors; a ribbon tied around the stem of a lamp here, a sprig of holly tacked between doorways there. If they had been there when Itachi went to sharpen his knife earlier, he hadn't noticed. He let his eyes stray over the bedroom doorways routinely as he walked back down the hall, as if the offender could be identified by whose room had the largest decorations. The last two years that Itachi had spent at the base over the holiday hadn't gone by with any seasonal props at all—other than Orochimaru's eggnog that one year. Deidara had been a different story of course, which was enough to make Itachi's head hurt from the memory, but given the time that the Iwa came back from his mission, this less than subdued form of holiday acknowledgement couldn't be credited to him. That left either Kisame or Zetsu.

As Itachi walked by his own bedroom, he saw that whoever the culprit was had already targeted his door. There was a large red paper silhouette of an overweight man with a large round hump over his shoulder taped to their doorway with the words "Merry Christmas" written out in white in the middle. From the folktales that Itachi had heard civilian mothers telling their children, he knew that the round shape was supposed to be a sack full of a combination of coal and toys to give children around the world based on how the man carrying it viewed their behavior. Why a family would welcome either from a judgmental elderly man who wasn't even a blood relation to the child in question was beyond him. Itachi didn't pause to stare at the cutout. _That_, at least, hadn't been there when he sharpened his knife earlier, he knew. His eyes might not be as efficient as they were a few years ago, but he knew his vision hadn't withered away to the point that he wouldn't be able to see a large red object placed squarely at eye level yet. There was no way he could have missed it. Unlike other things that were not necessarily hung at eye level...

Itachi's tongue darted out unconsciously to rake across his lower lip. If there was a taste lingering there, he missed it. He walked on.

Not time to think about that.

Zetsu was the one doing it, then. Unless Kisame had managed to limp to the door to put up the cutout. Briefly, he wondered why Zetsu would be any more interested in the holiday than the shark nin, but that thought didn't last long. Itachi was only a few steps away from his room when he heard the sound of a door opening behind him. Despite himself, Itachi froze in mid step. He might have expected to see Kisame standing there when he whirled around, eyes immediately going to the bedroom door, but instead there was only the red silhouette again. Across the hall from the jolly red senior citizen cutout, Deidara was standing in the doorway of the opposite bedroom, one hand resting on the knob and his face angled toward Itachi with the same startled expression that Itachi was carefully concealing on his own. He watched Deidara for a moment, while the blond stared back at him with one arm wrapped around a cardboard box that he held to his chest, to the point that it looked as if the box would bend in half at any moment and spill half its contents onto the floor.

"Un... Hi, Itachi," the blond shinobi said after several seconds had ticked by. Taking care not to make a sound, he stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. Itachi suppressed a frown as the blonde's one eye seemed to twirl, as if checking the hallway behind Itachi to see if anyone else was there.

He glanced down at the box in his comrade's arm, noting the words "MINE! Do NOT Touch!" clearly scrawled in red marker on the front, then shot a questioning look up at the former Iwa ninja's face. On occasion, he had seen Deidara's handwriting. Large, curling cursive letters dotted with overlapping loops that made reading it nearly as difficult as translating an enemy code. The box's words, though a bit uneven, were printed. When the blond didn't seem to be meeting his eyes, Itachi eased up on the suppression of his frown and asked, "Deidara, what's in that box?"

As if hearing another person's voice was a cue for him to start moving again, Deidara took another step away from his doorway, his now free hand wrapping around the other side of his prize, and said lightly, "A Christmas present."

Deidara smiled at Itachi while he said it, but unfortunately, didn't remember that it was the same smile that had been worn several years earlier one Christmas Eve when the eccentric artist had gone out to "get some air, un." When Deidara began to turn away, Itachi, momentarily forgetting that he was supposed to be looking for another comrade, prodded, "It's not going to blow up, is it?"

"Of course not, un," Deidara said, though one hand suddenly slid to hold onto a different part of the box, just enough so that the writing was covered by the wide bell of the blonde's sleeve. Deidara's expression didn't falter for a moment while his hand grazed casually up the side of the box, and in his mind Itachi thought momentarily of exploding fireworks. But Sasori would have beaten that habit out of him by now. Or at least, the Leader would have.

"Un, I have to go now, Itachi… Bye."

Deidara turned and began walking down the hall again, and almost instinctively, Itachi wanted to shake it off. It was an irresponsible impulse for a shinobi, Deidara was, after all, Deidara, but it was past experiences with team Crazed Artists that had created the habit to do so. Not even a full year ago, Sasori was the one who reined his partner in before, after, and sometimes while something was being blown apart that Kakuzu would grudgingly have to find the financial means to replace later. No one else ever needed to think about it. And so, Itachi was turned around and nearly two steps back into his mission to find Zetsu before he remembered that the Sand fugitive was no longer around to do the reining in anymore. But by the time that he whirled back around, Deidara had already disappeared around the corner.

Itachi stared weightily back at the corner for a second. The Leader _was_ already tense enough for the season because of his slip earlier... Leaving Deidara alone could result in a meltdown to overshadow that one year that Deidara had been stupid enough to set off his exploding artwork over the base.

…But he needed to find Zetsu first. The Grass nin would need to be out of the River Country before morning. Even if Sasori was gone, Deidara wasn't supposed to be Itachi's responsibility anyway—at the moment, finding Zetsu was. He told himself that the blond could wait, but even so he had to determinedly push any thoughts of explosions and horrified villagers out of his mind as he continued down the hall. Briefly, he wondered where Tobi was while he grasped the bathroom handle. Then, whether the former scout would have had any chance at curbing anything his more aggressive counterpart chose to do.

It wasn't likely, he decided.

Pushing the door open to see whether he could hope to find Zetsu sitting on the toilet seat with the Leader's hair brush in hand, Itachi thought wistfully that between it's two members, team 1i was going to get itself killed, and wondered, half seriously, just what the Leader had been thinking when he made the decision to pair the two together. But, while he was contemplating how long it would take for Deidara to come back to the base with the shattered remains of a spiral mask in his hands and an apologetic smile for the scout's former mentor, Itachi forgot a very basic rule of bathroom etiquette...

"Close the door! Close the door!"

...always knock before entering.

"Tobi?"

"CLOSE THE DOOR!"

Itachi had barely opened the door wide enough to fit his head through before he heard a loud clatter as something metallic hit the floor, and saw what was barely more than a flesh colored blur in the mirror opposite the doorway. He froze more out of surprise at himself for overlooking the possibility that the bathroom might have been in use rather than by the volume of the shout, or the utter panic that was momentarily visible in the mirror before, with a speed that finally did justice to the years of work that the Grass Village traitor must have put into his pupil's training, the pale body in front of him went through a rapid series of moves. The blur dipped down and snatched the rug off the tile floor, and Itachi was staring at the dusty frills of the shag matt in a mere fraction of a second, then at the reflection of a broad, pallid back in the mirror as the matt ducked to the side in a vain attempt to hide from view, and then at the surface of the door after it had been yanked out of his hand and slammed shut. Perhaps if Itachi's eyes hadn't been steadily worn down by years of over usage of his bloodline ability, following the overwhelming chain of rapid movements would have been possible. If his sharingan was activated, it might have been anyway. But standing there as he was, with the natural state of his eyes the only thing at his disposal before the vaguely visible, horrified expression in the mirror had disappeared in a fury of movement, he could only blink against the rush of displaced air, and just manage to step back in time to avoid getting hit by the decoration on the back of the door that was jarred loose by the impact of the slam.

Following the wreath's crashing, or more likely, the clapping sound of the door slamming, Itachi heard footsteps hurriedly coming down the hallway from the kitchen. He turned his head just in time to see Deidara swing himself around the corner, fast enough to make the blond pump of his ponytail whip around his shoulder and partially around his neck. Again, Itachi saw the blue eye dart along the length of the hall, and finding only Itachi, the blonde's naturally loud voice called, "What was that?"

"I think it was Tobi," Itachi answered back, but from the expression of the other's face, he wasn't sure whether it carried across the length of the hall. Again, his eyesight made it difficult to see what even a year ago would have been simple. He couldn't make out Deidara's expression. But Deidara's box was gone. Once again frowning under the distinct impression that leaving the subject of the blonde's package with its uncharacteristically bulky, legible handwriting alone was as dangerous as leaving a child unattended in a knife store, Itachi considered knocking on the door of the bathroom. Then gave it up when he considered the likelihood of the fussing rug-draped figure questioning his loud, stubborn partner.

Itachi sighed. At times like this, he almost wished the Sand shinobi hadn't gotten himself killed.

He opened his mouth to call out to the slightly blurred form of his blond haired comrade, this time willing to forget about Zetsu until he made sure that Deidara wasn't planning to hang hand-made clay ornaments outside, but, as if in tune with a secret coalition to keep Itachi constantly distracted from one task or another, the red cutout still taped to the front of his bedroom door began to stretch out into the hall. Immediately, the blond form just outside Itachi's range of clear vision turned and darted down the other corridor, as if the spiky shape taking form as it emerged from the wood was an Iwa hunter nin rather than his comrade of over ten years. Large green leaf-like appendages formed as the Grass nin took one materializing step over the threshold into the hallway, head already turned in Itachi's direction, but only after the explosion lover had already disappeared down the hall.

Itachi was very lucky that he was good at not looking annoyed. _Deidara _would have to wait until later then...

Zetsu blinked at Itachi slowly as he took another step into the corridor, withdrawing his other foot from the door as he did so, looking at him, then down near his ankle, and then simply asked, "Did you break it?"

Itachi shot Zetsu a look that easily summarized the word _What? _Then noting the drop in his comrade's line of vision again, looked down himself. The crumpled bundle of holly and festive decor stared back at him, light glinting off polished beads and the curves of waxy green leaves.

Well, that proved Kisame wasn't responsible for the sudden transformation of the base then...

With a forced swallow for patience, Itachi stepped to the side to let Zetsu look at the wreath, then counted out exactly one minute after Zetsu crossed the room to pick it up before announcing, "I need to talk to you."

Zetsu looked impassively up at him from where he was kneeling on the floor, cradling his circle of bruised holly, and Itachi honestly had no idea from his expression whether the Grass nin was mourning something lost or trying to fix it.

"If it's about Kisame, he's fine," Zetsu said, fingers absently weaving the red beads into place on the circlet. He stood up, and even though Itachi hadn't been standing directly above him, he still stepped back to avoid touching one of the leaves tunneling his comrade's vision. The plant man began to cross the hall quietly, going to the door leading to Kisame and Itachi's bedroom, and for whatever reasons, turned the knob rather than fazing through. Perhaps he was trying to save chakra. Itachi was only able to frown at it for a second before the door opened and his attention was quietly sucked into the wide opening as if by a vacuum.

It was odd. Itachi found that he could see into the bedroom, at an angle, from his position by the bathroom. Just far enough into the room that over Zetsu's shoulder he could see his dresser, and then the corner of his partner's bed, where three pillows were piled to elevate a leg with a familiar blue complexion. The other was resting idly beside it, bent up at the knee. It was only a little out of focus.

"Itachi?"

"It doesn't have anything to do with that," Itachi heard himself saying, though his voice sounded a bit too stern to be taken seriously. Itachi tried to shake himself as discreetly as he could before Zetsu turned around. The plant man had already been watching him over his shoulder, though with some difficulty given the leaves.

Itachi took a breath, swallowed, and then fixed his attention determinedly on the dividing line between the plant ninja's contrasting skin colors. "The Leader has decided to assign you our mission. You need to leave. Tonight," he went on, making an effort to curb the harsh tone in his voice, but the dual-colors of his comrade's skin made it hard to tell whether the un-fooled expression he imagined was really there.

Head angled a little to one side within the protective cage of his leaves, Zetsu's bright yellow eyes hovered over Itachi's face for a moment, but when he spoke his tone didn't imply noticing anything out of the ordinary about whether his younger comrade was drooling a glimpsed portion of exposed leg or not. Quiet and bland as ever, to the point that Itachi half wondered why his boisterous partner and the Grass nin had become as good of friends as they had, Zetsu asked, "You didn't just tell Tobi that, did you?"

Frowning a little, Itachi shook his head.

The plant ninja sighed, which Itachi could only tell vaguely from the shifting in the position of the other's shoulders, because he neither changed his expression nor made a sound. Without answering the imploring frown on Itachi's face, the plant-like man reached back into the room and pulled the door gently shut behind him. When he stepped away from it and went to start for the staircase leading down to the lower level, he looked at Itachi again, and then asked softly, "Would you mind if we spoke to you for a minute?"

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Kisame was lying back on the one pillow that Deidara had allowed him to keep for his head when he was in the room earlier, and on the other one that Zetsu had stolen from Itachi's bed after the blond missing nin left the room, when he heard the door open and close. He had been trying to fall asleep after Zetsu stepped out to look for the painkillers he still thought would be better for Kisame to take, and to probably sneak a look at whatever had happened to whatever he said fell over. Faintly, the shark nin heard the sound of his partner's voice through the wall, though it wasn't easy. He couldn't tell what he and Zetsu were saying to each other, but remembering the raving that Deidara had done in front of Zetsu earlier, and no doubt had repeated for the Leader, he could guess what the subject of the conversation was. It was a shame; he'd never liked their Tea Country lead. He'd been looking forward to the possibility of taking the man out...

He opened his eyes abruptly when he heard the sound of the door opening a second time. For a second, his first thought was that it was Itachi coming in to tell him what they both knew was obvious—the mission was off. However, that thought died when he heard the door carelessly slammed shut, and, contradicting, someone morosely hiss, "Un, Kisame?"

With an internal sigh that he made sure to keep to himself, Kisame turned his head toward the door, pushing himself up into a sitting position against his two pillows, just in time to see Deidara coming around the foot of Itachi's bed to stand in the narrow gap between it and Kisame's.

"Hello, Deidara," he said.

Deidara bounced himself back onto the Uchiha's mattress with decidedly less enthusiasm than Kisame would have expected. "I need to ask a favor, un..."

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"You're not coming with us, are you?" Zetsu asked once he and Itachi had reached the stairs. If Itachi hadn't been so sure that whatever comments the Grass nin made on their way down into the lower tunnels would be related to _just _what _had _he been staring at over his shoulder back in the hallway, the dark haired man might have been less inclined to blink stupidly at the question.

Luckily, Itachi was a few steps behind the plant manipulator, out of Zetsu's line of sight. And also completely unable to even attempt to read his self-contained comrade's unyielding poker face. As they approached the final steps, he answered just as quietly as he'd been questioned, "No."

"We didn't think so." At the bottom of the stairs, the entire massive bulk of Zetsu's upper body turned to allow the golden eyed man to look Itachi over, unable to do so by simply moving his head to glance over his shoulder. "Itachi-san, we have a problem that we would like you to help us with."

Itachi shot Zetsu an inquiring glance as he paused three steps from the floor, unable to go on with Zetsu blocking his way. He asked back, "What is it?"

Throughout the years of their acquaintanceship, Itachi could only recall three times that he had actually spoken to Zetsu for more than a few minutes. Once when he had first joined the Akatsuki and Zetsu had mistaken him for a lost civilian who had wandered too far away from the village and tried to entrap him in the woods for dinner, then again to tell him about his brother's fight against the Kyuubi holder, and then once more when Itachi's eyes first started failing him and the plant shinobi seemed to suddenly develop a deep rooted concern about just what had caused it and whether it could be treated or prevented—under different circumstances. Favors still seemed a little ahead of their relationship, but Itachi waited politely for his partner's friend to go on all the same.

"We've noticed Tobi having some...problems with his new partnership," Zetsu said, seeming to watch Itachi for a reaction, as if this could possibly be surprising news.

Itachi flicked aside a bang that had fallen out of place either when he was circling Deidara or when the bathroom door had been slammed in his face, and answered back, "Everyone has problems with a new partner."

Particularly when both partners have a mental status that could rival a chimp's, no matter how brilliantly they knew how to blow something up or do...whatever it was Tobi did. Some civilian scholars claim chimps were supposed to be brilliant, after all.

"We know that," Zetsu went on. "But we are worried that Deidara might not have been the _best_ match for Tobi."

Voice determinedly unchanging from its customary flat tone to suppress something akin to a groan whenever saying anything that vaguely related to either member of team 1i, Itachi answered, "They can't possibly be worse than Hidan and Kakuzu."

"No," Zetsu agreed quickly, "but we are worried that Tobi might have certain..._difficulties _with Deidara."

Itachi looked at Zetsu. A minute ticked by without the Grass nin going on his own, until Itachi raised an eyebrow pointedly for him to continue.

Zetsu's eyes darted to the side and back again quickly, which was unfortunately made impossible for any decent shinobi to miss because of their bright color. "Tobi," he started slowly, "had...a bad_ experience _with Iwa ninja when he was younger that we think might be making it difficult for him to find common ground with Deidara now."

Itachi paused, replayed the other's sentence in his head while Zetsu's golden pupils remained riveted to his face, and then finally asked, "Zetsu, are you implying that Tobi's prejudiced against Deidara?"

Never in ten years had Itachi ever seen Zetsu respond so quickly to a question. **"Yes—**No! Tobi has problems because**—he needs **_**help.**_**"** Zetsu paused seemingly to cough into his white hand, at which point Itachi half wondered if he ought to take a step back higher on the staircase until Zetsu had decided on which half of his personality was speaking.

"No, no," Zetsu said in quick succession after another moment had gone by. Down the hall, Itachi was sure the Leader must have been wondering what was taking his agents so long. "_No_, we don't think that Tobi is doing it consciously. If he was he would be much louder about it... Tobi is not very subtle," he added the last a little bit more quietly, as if he were divulging a secret that he didn't want to be over heard. Possibly by his less forgiving half.

It was still a challenge for Itachi not to take a step back from the dual personality. Thankfully, by the time he spoke his self control had successfully pushed down the oddity of his comrade's not entirely unknown quirks. "That still doesn't make any sense," he said calmly, "even if Tobi did have a psychological aversion to Iwa nin, Deidara renounced his village years ago."

"There's a bit more to it than that," Zetsu said earnestly. "We've never heard Tobi say that he doesn't like shinobi from Iwa, but we've suspected it for years. When he met Deidara, he didn't even need to say anything before they disliked each other—"

"That doesn't explain why Deidara would dislike Tobi," Itachi pointed out, then motioned for them to begin walking, remembering that they had come down to the lower level for a purpose.

"That, we think is just a coincidence."

"I can't say that I blame him for disliking him though," Itachi murmured, and left the comment to either be heard or ignored as they resumed their walk toward the Leader's office.

"Either way," Zetsu said as he fell into step behind him. "Deidara and Tobi are not working well together, and that could lead to problems for everyone."

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"Un..." Deidara said charily, "I need to hide something."

Kisame eyed him from where he was once again laying back on his pillows. "Like what?"

Deidara shifted to make himself more comfortable on Itachi's bed. Kisame didn't blame him. At that moment, the blond was probably wondering why Itachi chose to sleep on such a hard mattress when it really wouldn't take much skill to sneak into another's room and trade it for a more comfortable one during a base stationed period. Kakuzu and Hidan may be in the habit of locking their door, but for someone with Itachi's experience breaking in would have been child's play. As he watched Deidara fretfully cross his legs, first in the male style with one ankle atop his knee, and then gradually letting it slide down until his legs were hooked in the female position, Kisame could tell that Itachi's explanation about improving posture and coordination would be completely lost on the former Iwa nin. To Kisame, it looked as if Deidara were grumbling stiffly as he shifted in vein for comfort. As he leaned back on his hands, he finally said, sounding a bit distracted, "Something...big, un."

"Like...?"

"...a box." Pretending to look at himself in the mirror beyond Kisame's bed, the explosion artist surprised him by scooting himself discreetly farther back on Itachi's bed, pulling up and bending one leg under him when he was far enough, still wearing his travel worn sandals. If the blond had any luck at all, Itachi hopefully wouldn't notice dirt on his blanket later.

"What's in it?" Kisame pressed on cautiously. The last time he let Deidara hide something in his room, Itachi had ended up combing clay out of his hair for three days, while Kisame had received one massive bruise that hadn't healed for just as many weeks.

"Can't tell you, un," Deidara said, still leaning back on Itachi's bed with his shoes under him. "You'll give it away."

"Then you can't keep it here," Kisame said back. Just because he wasn't leaving the base tonight didn't mean that he wanted to spend the next month bedridden from whatever Deidara had, or his partner's reaction to it.

"Why not?"

_"Deidara..."_

The blond flicked his hair to the side, probably helped more by gravity than by actually wanting it moved over his shoulder, exposing the camera he had in place of a second eye. "Un, _Kisame, _you don't understand..."

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"You were hoping to resolve things between the over the base station period then?" Itachi said outside the Leader's office, speaking quietly lest the man on the other side overheard.

Zetsu nodded his two-colored head solemnly. "Leader-sama has had it scheduled since the three tails mission."

"That's a long time to wait to take action."

Zetsu ignored Itachi's comment. "We don't think that Deidara and Tobi are going to be patient with each other for very long," Zetsu went on as if he hadn't heard. "Especially Deidara... We'd feel better going on the mission if we knew someone made sure nothing explosive happened before we came back."

Itachi ignored the look that the plant hybrid sent him at the end of his sentence. Disinterestedly, he responded with, "What makes you think that they are going to do something before you return?"

Sighing, Zetsu seemed to slump a little, or at least Itachi assumed that the brief droop in the leaves surrounding his head indicated a slump. "Deidara has informed us about a more recent problem that has come up between them. We really should have seen it coming. You see, for a long time, Tobi has had issues with his..."

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"You stole Tobi's _masks?_" Kisame sprang back into an upright sitting position, ignoring the immediate frown that his blond haired comrade sent him in response to it. He had to get a better look at the blond, at least put in the effort to find some small trace on the other's face that could suggest he was joking. No one could be stupid enough to steal Kakuzu's piggy bank. No one could be stupid enough to steal Tobi's mask.

Deidara, however, was apparently not observant enough to have learned that basic fact on his own. Lying on his side with both feet stretched out on Itachi's bed, the Iwa prodigy propped himself up on one elbow and answered with a disapproving glance toward Kisame's foot. "Un, lay back down before you open your stitches."

"They're fine."

Deidara didn't look convinced.

"_Why?_"

"Un, I only took his spare ones. He still has the one he's wearing now..." The Iwa nin, taking his eyes off the bandage at the foot of Kisame's bed, looked up at his blue comrade's face, just for a second, and then broke eye contract. He twirled a finger innocently over the surface of the bedside table, glancing sheepishly to one side in a cliché picture of meekness that the shark nin knew better than to believe.

Unyieldingly, he repeated, _"Why? _The second Tobi finds out..." Kisame trailed off into a momentary lapse. You don't take Kakuzu's piggy bank. You don't take the Leader's headache medication. And you don't take Hidan's bible. Any one of those actions could result in another night like _that one that will never, ever be spoken of._ Kisame had to shake himself away from the image of blood, horror, and holly shoved into places that he never thought _anything _could be shoved into, not even able remember just how he was going to finish his sentence without referencing _that one really bad night._

"I _know,_" Deidara was growling back at him when he blinked himself back into the present. One blue eye was glaring viciously at the tabletop. "I know, un."

There was a clear message in Deidara's tone to drop the subject, but it might as well have not been there at all. Even if their was considerably less chance of Tobi or Deidara being beaten half to death by a swarm of angry carolers, Kisame knew Tobi well enough from their brief interactions to know that Tobi, despite whatever questions there might have been circling around minor traits like his coordination and education level, could blow up into something just as _annoying _as Hidan, if not as violent. As firmly as he could, knowing that his own safety, and possibly that of the entire base might be in danger, he said, "There's no way you're keeping them in here."

However, Deidara wasn't in the mood to be put off.

Springing into a sitting position just as readily as Kisame had a few minutes ago when the blond had proven that yes, he was there to cause a problem of some sort, the blond pounced on him. Kisame didn't think he even waited until he had stopped moving before he threw out, "Why not? Un, he'd never look in here! Itachi scares the hell out of him."

Kisame waited a beat for the hairs on the back of Deidara's neck to resettle before he said calmly, "Because Tobi's a child, and I don't want him in my room when he flips and has the spaz of a lifetime."

Deidara glared at him, letting his head angle a little to one side so that his bangs once again covered his camera eye. "Fine then, un, I'll take them back," he said after a sullen pause. Then added, before Kisame could take a breath to say something, "But I don't know why everyone thinks I'm any better than Tobi, un."

That was a trap. Coming from anyone else in the organization, perhaps excluding the mask shinobi himself, Kisame would have known better than to answer it. However, he was curious. Before he could argue against it, he heard himself answer sarcastically, "Better at _what, _exactly?"

"I'm not that mature either, un."

While Kisame raised an eyebrow, trying to figure out just what that vague statement was supposed to translate to, Deidara leaned forward, relocating his legs again so that his feet rested on the ground, hands planted on his knees. "What if _I _get upset, un? I might go downstairs to talk to Leader-sama. And I might accidentally tell him, un, what you and Itachi were really doing when I walked in."

Trap sprung.

Kisame stared at Deidara, mouth open on impulse to make a reply, but unable to do so because his brain had no idea what kind of a response to form and send out. He sat there quietly, staring.

"Un...so, is there room in the closet?"

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Once Zetsu had finally gone into the Leader's office, Itachi was glad to find himself back in the kitchen. The clock above the door clearly stated that Kisame and Itachi had only two hours left before they went onto sleep shift, and if the schedule was handled correctly, the problems with team 1i could be avoided entirely until Zetsu got back from the Tea Country. Where the two members of the team were now, Itachi had no idea. Tobi was most likely off sulking somewhere, if someone had told him that his beloved mentor was going to gone over Christmas Eve, and Deidara, given the peaceful atmosphere of the dormitory hall when Itachi had passed through, was someplace blissfully out of earshot.

There were only a few reminders that routine had been temporarily thrown off that night, other than Kisame's absence from the kitchen. He had been mildly surprised when he came back from the lower level, walking around the corner near Zetsu's room to reach the kitchen, and then being confronted with the small sprig of greenery that was responsible for the evening's turn of events. He had been looking for it when he turned the corner, but had still somehow been surprised by finding it. It was tiny thing, with only three tablespoon-sized leaves and a meager number of white flower buds. It was no wonder that he had missed it earlier, when he had been too preoccupied with wiping the knife clean on his cloak to look up before he heard his partner's footsteps. The only thing that drew attention to the pitiful branch at all was a puffy red bow tied under the leaves to bunch them together so that it would look less sparse. Someone of Kisame's height would have seen it easily.

Itachi licked his lips again. This time, he thought about it; he couldn't help it. He could faintly remember where the teeth had nipped him earlier, the instant before the knife slithered its way out of his hand. It made him feel a heady and a little warm in a way that was all too familiar, and Itachi had to swallow to keep foam from reaching his mouth when he thought back to the unresponsive, yielding stated he'd gone into when his partner caught him off guard. Less than an hour ago.

Aside from the mistletoe discovery, there was also a plain, gray colored folder lying on the table behind Itachi as he stood at the chopping board. Before he left Zetsu in the lower level, he'd asked Itachi to take it from his room on his way back, saying that he could prove that his pupil had...issues regarding Deidara's heritage. He'd told Itachi about it just a few moments before pressing for a final assurance that yes, if it meant so terribly much to him, he and Kisame would step in if things needed to be settled between Deidara and Tobi before the Grass nin could get back to handling the task himself.

He was still disinclined to consider the plant man's theory, even with the supposed proof on the supper table behind him. He hadn't looked at the file yet, despite telling Zetsu he would. For all Itachi cared to know about Tobi, there might really be a psychological aversion with Stone Village shinobi, but the fact remained that the Stone Village shinobi in question was Deidara Almost any two ninja on a team created to "balance out one another's abilities" was liable to start an argument. He'd even heard of the legendary sannin breaking into spontaneous group fist fights back when the group was together, which, remembering Orochimaru's collected persona, could not have been an easy accomplishment. But with Deidara, loud, stubborn, insistent _Deidara_, the chances of a fight starting up were much more than "liable", they were _definite. _The better part of the blonde's partnership with Sasori had been spent bickering about what qualified as art and what was just a waste of creativity. There was a possibility that their time spent arguing might even have outdone Hidan and Kakuzu's, though admittedly resulting in fewer injuries. Just because the tendency had carried over to the blonde's second partnership was no reason to think that it meant something unusual was going on...

Itachi heard the sound of the kitchen door clicking behind him, and paused with his knife (newly cleaned of blood from earlier) halfway through slicing an onion. Turning to see who it was, Itachi looked over his shoulder. Then, as if it were trying to tease him, his knife almost slipped out of his hand.

"Hey, Itachi," Kisame said as he stepped into the kitchen. Immediately, Itachi's eyes shot to his partner's left leg while the shark nin was closing the door. Just for a moment. When Kisame turned his attention back on Itachi, casually, as if he weren't putting deliberate care into how fast he walked, he managed to cement his focus to his partner's face.

"...Hello." Still holding the knife, Itachi watched his partner make his way into the room, looking however subtly for any sign of unevenness in his steps. Then shook himself again. "Shouldn't you be lying down?"

"You sound like Deidara." Kisame stopped at the table and pulled out a chair. "I'm fine. We both know I've lived through worse hurts than _this_."

"Hn," Itachi said by way of vague agreement. Kisame shot him a grin, and quickly, Itachi tore his eyes away before he could be caught staring. Focusing on his knife more than before, least it try to betray him again, he resumed chopping and let silence fall over the kitchen. Somehow, it was more noticeable with two in the room than it had been with one.

Itachi wondered whether Kisame had stopped to stare at the mistletoe over the doorway too before he walked in. Such a tiny thing dictating behavior—making two people kiss on a moment's notice simply because they happen to walk under a certain plant. It was silly.

Even if Kisame was a good kisser.

Itachi was scraping small uniformed cubes of onion into a neat pile to be moved into a custard dish, when Kisame cut off the temporary quiet with, "What's this?"

A glance over Itachi's shoulder told him that Kisame had picked up Zetsu's file on his pupil's rocky relationship with Deidara. Thankfully, he managed to keep aggravation out of his voice when he answered, "A report arguing that Tobi has a psychological problem with Deidara's nationality."

There was a pause. Itachi turned back around to transfer the cubes.

"Are you serious?"

"Zetsu seems to think it's possible."

The sound of paper moving behind him indicated that Kisame had opened the file. "That's ridiculous."

Out of the shark nin's view, Itachi shot the wall a look that meant, _"You DON'T say." _To his partner, he said normally, "If it's true, then Deidara's personality hasn't helped matters."

"Yeah, probably not..." Another pause followed, during which Itachi heard the sound of paper again as a page was turned. He finished wiping the last small sliver of onion into the side bowl, shoved the wasted pieces to a far corner of his chopping board, and began peeling the dry skin off another before he heard the other shinobi speak again.

"How long has Zetsu been keeping this?"

"A few years, probably." Holding the clean onion against the board, Itachi chopped off the knots located on the top and bottom of the vegetable, pushing them aside.

"The first entry is dated over a decade ago." Paper audibly scratched against paper again. "I didn't know Tobi was in a war," followed a few moments later, with the younger of the two listening to the paper, and the almost nonexistent sounds of his partner's breath.

Another flash of Itachi's knife, and the once circular onion was split in half. "That's probably how he became a jounin," the black eyed man answered passively. "Most villages tend to drop their standards during war times."

There was a laugh behind him, despite the fact that Itachi hadn't indicated he was joking, and then another question. "Why did Zetsu give you this?"

It was at this point in the conversation that Itachi was laying one half of the onion on its side, and trying to brush the wasted fragments of its predecessor out of the way. Gathering the paper-like pieces of onion skin and severed edges into in his hand, he turned around to throw them away in the trashcan, located on the opposite side of the kitchen. Why Sasori had decided to put it there when he set up the layout of the room had never been clear, but, regardless of however many times Itachi had tried to move it since the Sand nin's death, someone out of either habit or insistence had always returned it to its original place. He was intending to drag it back to the counter again (partly for convenience, and partly to see whether he could blame Zetsu or Kisame for the minor annoyance after the Grass nin's departure), when he realized that turning around was a mistake.

At the table, Kisame had turned one of the chairs around so that it faced Itachi's direction. Atop it, he had placed his injured foot, bent up at the knee so that Zetsu's file could be opened against his thigh as he read. Because of that position, the shark ninja only needed to lift his head a little to make eye contact over their comrade's self-kept record, which he did after Itachi stopped moving. For Itachi's part, despite the temporary return to normalcy of moment ago, and even the somewhat regular glances he'd been taking over his shoulder, he wasn't able to keep his eyes from riveting to the white bandage standing out starkly against the brown of the wooden chair and the blue of Kisame's skin. There was a deep scarlet that had already seeped through the linen, and looking like a screaming red reminder that less than an hour ago he had been standing in the doorway almost with his mouth open for a set of devilishly sharp teeth and a prodding tongue, and feeling something wake up that hadn't been awake since he decided it wasn't needed as a part of his life...

"Itachi? Are you alright?"

Itachi shook himself, once again forcing his eyes away from where a knife had abruptly interrupted them by lodging itself between the bones and muscle inside his partner's foot earlier, to meet a concerned stare from his partner. One navy blue eyebrow was raised, both dark pupils focused on the Uchiha as if looking for signs of illness.

Itachi coughed a little. "Fine," he said, and breaking eye contact, walked briskly toward the waste basket, but he could hear his partner setting down Zetsu's report on the table.

"If this is about earlier..." Kisame's gravelly voice reached him tentatively. Itachi, keeping his back to the other ninja, had to linger by the trashcan after depositing the onion waste, willing the heat to leave his face before he turned back around. Breathe slow, swallow. This wasn't anything he hadn't dealt with before and didn't know how to handle. It was only Kisame, after all.

His new verdict was snickering at him over its predecessor's grave.

"Don't worry about it, alright? Deidara's making it out to be more than it is. I think he's been...stressed more than usual lately."

At other times, Itachi could have been ashamed for how relieved he felt after Kisame's finished speaking. If Kisame noticed how quickly the tension left his shoulders, he didn't make a jibe out of it. It certainly wasn't like him, but at the moment Itachi only breathed out slowly, thankful that Kisame had only been talking about the knife wound.

Turning away from the waste basket, he managed to avoid staring at his partner again.

It was odd to even have the urge to stare at Kisame that way. A few more years, and he would have known the former member of the Mist Seven for longer than he had his own family. Over half his life. Throughout that time, the shark nin had never appealed. Sneaking a glance over his shoulder, though Itachi really didn't need to, he looked back at Kisame. The shark nin was leaning toward the table top to read another page of his friend's self-kept report, and Itachi let his eyes travel from cobalt shoulder to elevated leg. There was no cloak baring his view—Kisame grumbled while wearing the uniform jacket outside, wearing it inside would only happen if the alternative was living in a freezer. He could see the scars lining the swordsman's well toned arms, and where the faded black tank top was stretched tautly over the cornflower-colored muscles of his back.

Sex, Itachi had already regrettably lost his original verdict on. It served a purpose, it felt good, and it often created illusions of attachment where illusions were not necessarily intended to be placed, but was overall not something that he needed to have in his life. That had all been decided with Kisame right there, in sight, wearing that same skimpy black shirt, though then the word "skimpy" wouldn't have been attached to his description in anyway. All through his experimentation period, through puberty—even that Christmas Eve with team Dead-set-on-Not-Aging, Kisame had been sitting right beside him, filling his glass. Itachi wasn't even a teenager anymore. The window for unexpected bouts of lust was firmly shut and blinds pulled. The ship had already long since sailed and landed on a completely different continent. It had no right to be pestering him now.

He didn't even really like men all that much.

As if hearing and challenging the Uchiha's last thought, Kisame turned a page in the report with a long fingered hand, paused, and reached back to work a crick out of his neck from leaning onto the table for too long, arching back with his partner still watching, as his hand massaged its way down his spine. Kisame's eyes thankfully closed before, without pausing, as if there was a small demon in his head that had been waiting for his partner's attention to ebb, Itachi's eyes shot directly down to where, with one of Kisame's legs propped up on the chair and the other on the floor, an anatomically significant area was left open for inspection.

Once more, Itachi had to violently shake himself out of staring, closed his eyes tightly and turned his head. No, he didn't like men more than women, but he did likethem. He'd already known that before dropping a knife on his partner's foot in the kitchen doorway earlier.

But that raised a different question.

...Did Kisame?

"How's your foot?" he said over his shoulder when he was back at the counter with his chopping board, with the shark nin to his back.

"Alright." Itachi heard a moment later, "I was more surprised than anything else when it happened."

Itachi skipped around commenting on the aftermath that was still more foggy in his mind than anything else. "How long before you can travel again?"

Itachi thought that he heard the beginnings of "Not long" over his shoulder, but could not completely make out the words before a crash sounded from down the hall, drowning the shark nin out before he could finish the first syllable. Both shinobi jerked, surprise immediately improving their posture. Itachi spun toward the door sharply enough to make the strands of his hair swish against his forehead, just in time to see Kisame jump out of his two chairs in one fluid motion that, he was positive, which was quickly followed by a suppressed wince when the shark nin landed on his bad foot.

They met eyes for a second, neither one of them bothering to ask the other what they thought the noise was before starting for the door. A second, less startling crash sounded as Kisame's hand landed on the surface of the loose-hinged door, pushing it open to peer out toward the corner leading to the dormitory hall. Itachi followed him, his knife still held in his hand, but stopped just before stepping under the doorway with his eyes shooting up to where a tiny holiday reminder innocently perched.

"It's nothing," Itachi heard Kisame grumble, with his attention still turned down the corridor.

The Uchiha's eyes slowly flicked up to the plant hung over the door, then back down to the tank top-clad man below. Behind the shark ninja's back, Itachi's expression became thoughtful.

"Nothing?" he said imploringly as he study the back of the shark nin's head. Then he glanced down at the knife in his hand, still sticky with onion juice.

Kisame nodded his head tiredly, still not looking back as he answered, "It's just Tobi and Deidara down the hall."

"I see." Itachi thought about asking Kisame what made him so sure that it was just their comrades (even if they were infamously loud and destructive) were causing the commotion outside the kitchen. There was no way of seeing as far around the corner as Deidara and Tobi's room, even if Kisame was still staring at it as if he could. He flexed his fingers around the handle of his knife as if testing his grip, and then finally, took a step forward.

"Should we go down there to see what they're doing?" Itachi offered prodding, and was almost surprised by how quickly he was given a _"No"_ in response.

Kisame stepped to the side accommodatingly as Itachi joined him in the doorway. When he finally turned back around he stopped, and for a second Itachi thought that he might have seen the slightest traces of agitation on his partner's face before, following the line of Itachi's vision, the shark nin looked up. Then froze.

When he looked back down, their eyes locked eyes. A second ticked by. Kisame looked pointedly toward the one of Itachi's hands that was raised with the tip of his knife held up at elbow level. Placing his hand over Itachi's wrist in the careful slow manner one might use with a pet that would either bite or purr when touched, he started to chuckle.

"Strange we would both forget that was there, isn't it?"

Despite his partner's casual tone, Itachi didn't answer. He had a passing urge to shrug or grin, but quickly strangled both so that neither would be readable on his face when his partner took the one step needed to bring them close enough to comply with the holiday tradition. He was even able to fight back against the tightening finger of anticipation in his gut when he felt a rough thumb slide into place on his chin, tipping his head back for the kiss and giving him a chance to meet his partner's eyes directly before the attack that had left him stupefied before could be repeated.

This time there wasn't a startled gasp for Kisame to catch his mouth in when their lips met. Itachi was fully alert when the shark nin leaned down to his level, but Kisame only touched him briefly. He could have shivered at the first brush of rough lips against his own, remembering the hungry swipe that had accompanied them earlier, but the teeth didn't make an appearance. He felt pressure instead, incredibly light with only the barest movement before he again felt the normal emptiness of air and the hold on his chin disappeared as his partner straightened away from him.If Itachi stopped to think, he may have more closely considered the last kiss and that, with the result of the more playful approach still likely a dull ache in every step the former swordsman of the Mist took, Kisame was probably comply with a very basic rule of trial and error. At the moment, however, Itachi was not in a mind to consider. Kisame had only managed to move a fraction away from him when two expressions flickered unauthorized onto the smaller ninja's face. Surprise was the first one, coming in response to how quickly the encounter was ending, very quickly followed by something that must have been alarmingly similar to a glare in appearance, from the brief flash of Kisame's expression before Itachi's free hand found purchase in the collar of that time-worn shirt. Itachi saw the shark nin's eyes dart down to stare at the imposing grip in surprise, but they didn't stay there long before Itachi took a step closer to his already close partner, to attack the other's unguarded mouth.

Itachi supposed that he was lucky his partner's teeth didn't draw blood when he tongued the suprise-laxed lips apart, catching the lower of the two between his teeth for a moment before then bringing it into his own mouth. If there was a protest, Kisame didn't go out of his way to make it known; Itachi half watched his partner while he jerked his other hand free. Even the clattering of his knife when it hit the ground beside them didn't draw a sound from the former member of the elite swordsmen's of the Mist Village, nor when the now liberated hand relocated to the hallow where neck met skull and pulled the blue head down closer for better access to the wet cavern of the shark man's mouth. The Uchiha's tongue reentered curiously, first brushing feather lightly over the line of pointed teeth as if tempting them to close against it, the made its way deeper. He sought Kisame's, but was still surprised when, after wrapping his own around it, he felt the wet muscle move encouragingly back against his in return.

Down the hall there was another sound, not a crash, but loud all the same, and followed by a jumbled sputtering of words. It might have been a door opening. Or maybe one closing, Itachi wasn't quite sure. It might have been near Hidan and Kakuzu's room. Or possibly Zetsu's...

A calloused hand slipped around Itachi's waist as he nudgingly guided his partner's tongue back into his own mouth, where it was imprisoned by a gentle suction as he was pulled closer to the larger body of his partner.

...That wasn't him moaning, was it?

Itachi noticed before he pulled back, that Kisame was now hazily staring back at him, his hand resting low on his back, but when they broke apart neither of them said a word. There really wasn't a chance to; there were footsteps coming up the hall now, hastily approaching the corner just as Itachi carefully stepped out from under the mistletoe, least their comrades notice where they were standing. He noted quietly to himself that his breathing was somewhat heavier than it would usually be for one kiss. With the rush after the earlier one, he couldn't be sure whether it had happened before or whether panting should be counted as a new advancement. His hand was still laxly resting on the curve of Kisame's shoulder, having slid down from the back of the others head when they stepped away from each other, and though he knew the shark nin was looking at him when he turned his head to blinkingly notice the hand's position, Itachi's eyes had dropped irrevocably down to the other's lips. He tried to keep his face blank as he pulled it back, and then watched as Kisame tried to smooth the wrinkles out of his shirt where he'd clutched it, even if his insides were giving off that feeling that they were close to burning again.

Glancing at Kisame, Itachi came to yet another new conclusion to add to his list. As the shadows of their two comrades appeared at the corner, and Kisame tentively brushed his mouth over with his fingers to check for swelling, and hearing Deidara and Tobi's tantrum rounding the corner to meet them, he decided that libido had worse timing than Hatake Kakashi.


	3. 3 6

Tobi appeared at the end of the hall with his hair sticking out in small damp spikes and his mask skewed diagonally across his face his face. Given how quickly he turned the corner—a dangerous thing given the new-made organization member's coordination—Kisame knew that the other agent was close to being frantic. He wasn't quite there yet though; Kisame could tell even as the scout scurried down the hall like a mouse from a slice of carnivorous swiss cheese. A frantic Tobi was a very, very loud Tobi. He could tell that, and even take a fairly accurate guess as to why Zetsu's student would be worried at the moment, and feel a faint pang of guilt in the back of his mind for him. But even with that, a glance to the side at Itachi, who was at that moment staring coolly toward the wall opposite them, made Kisame feel like strangling the newer member of team 1i.

It was hard for him to tell whether it showed during the urge's brief lifespan. Tobi was as difficult to read as his mentor. At least, on the few occasions that the masked ninja wasn't speaking or moving, he was. He decided that Tobi must have been running long before he reached the corner, because in rounding it the speeding caused him to come within a hair of crashing directly into Itachi before the Uchiha's below zero stare swinging 'round to him and drove him hastily back. To all appearances, the masked agent was beyond noticing the incriminating piece of mistletoe posted above their heads, but remembering the sounds of doors simultaneously slamming a few minutes ago, Kisame follow Itachi's lead in stepping away from the doorway least the other half of the team appear and prove to be in a much more observant mood.

Tobi fidgeted under Itachi's deadpan stare, seeming temporarily to have forgotten what he'd come running down the hall for only a few seconds earlier. Deidara had been right when he said that hiding Tobi's most prized possessions under Uchiha Itachi's pillow was the best strategy to keep him from finding them. Tobi was indeed terrified of Itachi, and every member of the organization knew it. The very first time Tobi saw Itachi stepping out of the hallway bathroom, only a few days after the massacre in the Fire Country that would make his name known in every shinobi village worth mentioning, and two scant hours after signing himself into the organization, the one-eyed scout had supposedly stopped and let out a scream shriller than what most men give on their deathbed. Hidan claimed that it was even louder than Kisame's on _that one really bad night. _Outside their first meeting though, Kisame couldn't think of any time that he had seen or heard of Itachi paying any deliberate attention to Zetsu's former student, but then, there were plenty of things about Itachi that didn't need interaction to make someone run away screaming.

"H-hi. Um...h-have you..." Tobi said, now a polite three steps away from the last note-worthy member of the Uchiha clan. His fingers were wrestling with each other by his side, Kisame noticed. He couldn't see his partner's expression from where he was standing now, but he could guess what it must have looked like given the chilly regard the wall had received a few moments prior.

Behind Tobi, Deidara rounded the corner much less hurriedly to catch up with his excitable masked partner. When he saw Kisame, the blond ninja stopped, glanced at the back of Tobi's head, then at Itachi. He sent a pointed look toward him over his partner's shoulder.

"Un," Deidara said with emphasis, speaking in Tobi's direction even as his eye darted toward Kisame's in what was almost distinguishable as a warning, "are you sure you didn't leave them in Zetsu's room?"

Before Tobi could answer, Itachi turned his attention on Deidara. Just as well; Tobi didn't seem to be making any progress beyond stuttering the same word. "Leave what?" Itachi asked.

Deidara, luckily, had never shown even the slightest sign of unease around Itachi. "Nothing," he thrust out quickly, but unfortunately wasn't the only person to answer. Without the sharingan user staring him down, Kisame saw Tobi shake himself, just in time to manage a response on the heels of Deidara's one-word answer.

"I can't find my masks."

Itachi turned to look at him again, and Kisame could have sworn Tobi shrank a fraction of an inch away. One would think that after years of working together, the scout would have adapted to having one of the world's most famous mass murderers walking down the same hall as him...

"Zetsu-san said he would move them for me before we got back," Tobi said by way of explanation to the cool, possibly red eyes watching him for more information.

Deidara's eye fluttered to the side, traveling up the wall discreetly before making its way to Kisame's face as he added dully, "He probably forgot."

"He_ wouldn't_ forget." Tobi's mask turned until the eyehole came as close to looking over his shoulder as was safely possible. It sounded like a repeated statement.

If it was, Deidara didn't miss a beat. "He might have been busy, un."

"But our room's just down the hall!"

"So?"

"So, he wouldn't forget!"

"He _might_ have, un."

The easy transition to five year old children by his two comrades was mildly startling in how quickly it came. _Only_ mildly though. Kisame had to pause a second to wonder what had possessed the Leader to admit one, much less both of them into their organization, but Itachi was unfazed.

"Why don't you ask Zetsu where they are, then?"

Tobi paused, turned his head back around. "He's, uh...still in the Leader's office."

"He's still briefing for the mission?"

"Yeah, but they weren't in his room when I looked there anyway..."

Behind him, Deidara snorted. The blond started to open his mouth, muscles giving off the slightest hint of what could have been a smirk, and that was when Kisame knew that he had to cut in. Deidara, despite being loud, reckless, flitty, and prone to bad decisions (if his late partner's ramblings had meant anything), _was _undoubtedly a qualified member of the organization. He could even be called a genius when he wasn't arguing the definition of art or being asked to reason with certain, ego-inflated, mask-wearing comrades. But when assessing the former Iwa nin's good points, it was important to note that subtlety was not among them.

"Un—"

"Tobi, I think I can help you find you masks."

Deidara paused with his mouth still opened. Three sets of eyes turned to look at the shark nin (well, more honestly two since only four eyes were actually present). Deidara sent him a tight-lipped, expectant look over his partner's shoulder, blue eye darting pointedly down the hall as if he thought Kisame had forgotten about their arrangement. Itachi's expression was only faintly less frigid than it had been when the two members of team 1i came down the hall. He was standing a little in front of the shark nin, looking back over his shoulder at him, lips only a little darker than usual from the two star events of the evening so far.

Unconsciously, Kisame found himself staring at them, feeling a light tug at the back of his thoughts reminding him that whatever happened a few minutes ago was certainly the more interesting subject to follow than preventing disputes between his two child-minded comrades.

"Alright. Thanks, Kisame-sempai."

Pulling his attention away, Kisame looked back at Zetsu's former pupil and his silent blond partner. "Don't mention it..."

Itachi, after a second, gave a hard blink, which was the closest that the Uchiha ever came to shaking himself in public, and then, with his usual lack of verbal output, turned to go back into the kitchen. As Kisame turned the corner, passing Deidara, who was frowning at something closer to the floor but at least not making any sign of antagonizing his partner further, he inwardly estimated the time that had elapsed since leaving the kitchen with a knife stuck in his foot earlier, adding it up in his mind to reach a conclusion. Then sighed at it.

Still one hour left until sleep shift.

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Shifts in the Akatsuki were divided up as evenly as possible. That way at least, members with more explosive tempers were given less to complain about; granted that member would have a partner to share the chores that accompanied the wake shift anyway. For each partner team the hours were split over the day: twelve for sleeping, twelve for being awake. Of course, in most cases the sleep shift wasn't entirely spent sleeping. The only times that Itachi could think of when they were, involved agents returning from month long missions, and even then with the extra complications of hunter nin or mission failure. Sometimes the shifts were extended if there was a substantial injury involved, though even in those cases the Leader was reluctant to make exceptions to his carefully laid out schedule. Depending on the time of arrival, returns were the only times when shift hours became sketchy, while the team coming home and the ones that were already there juggled with one another to find a balance before the next team was sent out. In the past, Itachi had spent several periods at the base with Deidara before Sasori's death, including the Christmas Eve that he still felt fatigued at remembering. During all of them, he had been able to keep interactions to a somewhat reasonable level with the help of the Leader's shift system. He didn't have a problem with Deidara anymore than he did with anyone else in the organization. He simply always preferred the red haired puppet master to his eccentric blond counterpart, regardless of whether the puppet master was living or dead.

Which was why the hairs on the back of his neck momentarily rose when he turned away from the sound of their partners' footsteps fading down the hall and found the blond watching him curiously. Deidara didn't show any sign of noticing when he returned the look with a glower as he reached for the door handle. His eyes were still red from staring down Tobi when the pathetic former scout almost knocked him to the floor. Even the voice piquing wisely from a corner of his mind that Zetsu's pet was going to relay that information to his idolized master wasn't enough to convince Itachi to switch his bloodline ability off; as far as Itachi was concerned, "Bad Timing" was for now tattooed across the faces of both partners of team 1i.

He heard Deidara stepping closer as if to follow him when he pushed open the kitchen door, and considered for moment shutting it pointedly behind him when he went in, but he found himself stopping again on threshold at the sight of two hulking green leaves peeking over the open door of the fridge.

"Zetsu, what are you doing?"

"Un, hey, Zetsu!"

The former Grass ninja was standing still partly sunken into the floor, with the majority of his body hidden behind the shielding surface of the refrigerator door. To see them, the plant man had to take a sloshing step back, and then when he did so, his neon gold pupils fastened first on Itachi, and then Deidara, who standing almost close enough for his chin to brush alongside Itachi's ear. When the neon his eyes darted upward, Itachi immediately took a hasty step forward into the kitchen to escape the doorway.

Zetsu seemed to be hiding a smirk in the corner of at least one side of his mouth that the rest of his face made certain not to commit to when he answered the still tension radiating murderer of the Uchiha clan. "Leader-sama asked us to get him some water for his medication. He was telling us about the mission, then he said he needed to take something. Badly."

Itachi was thankfully able to resist the impulse to send a stern look back to the knowing grin he was imagining on the other shinobi's face; he was about to comment that the Leader didn't have medication, but then Deidara interrupted from behind him, "What mission?"

"We are going to the Tea Country in Kisame and Itachi's place," Zetsu said easily as he flicked the refrigerator's door shut and stepped fully out from the floor. In his hand there was indeed a large half empty bottle of water, but rather than slinking back down the levels to where the Leader was supposedly waiting for him, he turned and started walking toward the cupboard above the sink.

Deidara stood oddly motionless in place after Itachi walked further into the kitchen. He was quiet even after Itachi sent him a look from the table, where he began straightening the chairs that Kisame and the blond had left out of place a few minutes ago.

"...You're leaving?" the blond uttered after a minute of silence.

Itachi didn't turn his head. "For a month, yes."

There was a clink from the far side of the room, and Itachi frown yet again (he was going to get wrinkles for how many times he had frowned at someone that night) when glanced to the side to monitor what Zetsu was doing, and found that the plant-man hybrid had gone to the cupboard holding Hidan's ceremonial crystal, and was currently holding one long clear glass up to the light as if inspecting it for spots. A second one was sitting on the counter near him. "Zetsu...what are you doing now?"

"We are thirsty too."

"And you need wine glasses?"

"Yes."

"Why can't Itachi go on the mission?"

Zetsu held up the second wine glass for inspection before both disappeared into the bulky expanse of his cloak, where Itachi assumed the bottle had already gone. He was the one to answer Deidara's question instead of the black and white figure examining their absent comrade's crystal. "The mission requires a large muscle mass."

"What?"

**"He's too scrawny."**

Deidara gapped over Itachi's shoulder. The Uchiha himself paused and swiveled his head around slowly to see Zetsu coughing into the back of his hand. The spy had the decency to look sheepish when he looked back at them. "Sorry."

"Is there anything else you would like to know?" Itachi asked sharply as he looked back to Deidara.

The blond pulled back his bangs, staring to the side as if there was something troubling hovering over by the kitchen table a little beyond the Uchiha standing there, then asked carefully, "Why can't Kisame go, un?"

"You said yourself how bad his foot is," Itachi said back.

"Yeah..." whatever was over by the table bounced onto the floor then up near Itachi's shoulder. "He was walking just fine a second ago though, un."

"Kisame is not supposed to be walking at all." This last came from Zetsu, and surprisingly closer than before. Itachi's neck was beginning to ache a little from being turned one direction to the other so many times, but nevertheless he looked over his shoulder again to see Zetsu standing behind him.

"Excuse us."

Zetsu passed him, the glasses making a slight twinkling sound within the fabric of his cloak as he moved. Deidara didn't seem to hear him when he repeated the words to him, though. He was still standing squarely in the doorway, seemingly oblivious of what hung over his head, with his one eye continuing to follow an unknown something that apparently was holding some personal offense with him. It landed atop Zetsu's head when the Grass nin asked again for the Iwa nin to step aside so that he could go out into the hall.

Biting his lip, Deidara said, "Un...Tobi's going to freak out when he finds out you're leaving."

Zetsu's blank expression faltered a little bit. He seemed to pause for s second, leaves just as impenetrable as before when Zetsu turned his head and let them block off the view of his face. His voice was just as non-readable as always he answered, "...Yes, he probably will."

"...And he's probably going to blame me," Deidara added. He shot the former Grass nin what might have been a pleading look.

"That's likely too."

There was another long pause. Itachi watched as Zetsu shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the glasses helpfully announcing the movement. Deidara's face had become rather pale, to the point that Itachi would have almost thought that it could qualify as worried. But then, easily as the silence had come, the Grass trained shinobi straightened his spine again. From where Itachi stood, he saw the fingers of the other's darker hand thrumming along the shape of a bottle on the side of his cloak facing him, before it rose up. The white hand patted the blond ninja's shoulder sympathetically, rested there for a long moment. Then, with a nudge that might have been the same as saying _"Good luck with that", _wheedled his way around the Iwa nin to get back into the hall.

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The day that Tobi was finally made an official member of the Akatsuki, Kisame and Itachi had still been well away from the organization headquarters. They had heard about it through Hidan, after the long-time pending scout had already been sworn in and hurtled out on his first mission with his not entirely willing partner. By Hidan's account, even Zetsu had been surprised by the Leader's sudden change in mind about Tobi; most of the agents hadn't even been aware that the Leader was seriously considering him, much less that he would decide to partner him with the one member most likely to orchestrate the masked ninja's untimely, explosive death. Tobi had come to the organization with Zetsu, had gone on missions with Zetsu, and for a while was hardly ever seen without Zetsu. There had been no need to initiate Tobi into the Akatsuki since it had been unanimously understood that the persistent, clumsy creature that was roach-like in its ability to neither die nor disappear no matter where his master was sent, would always stay with _Zetsu._

The Leader however, during whatever spurt of insanity that had overtaken him when he put together team 1i, apparently hadn't been aware of that unanimous agreement.

Moving Tobi out of Zetsu's room had supposedly gone slowly, partly because the ink that Tobi used to sign his name on the contract had barely been able to dry before he was saddled with Deidara on a giant clay bird headed for the Sea Country. When the move finally did happen, Kisame and Itachi had been staking out a claimed sighting of the Legendary Sanin known as Jiraiya and the kyuubi holder in the Rain Country, well out of reach of whatever drama may have come with the infamous event. By the time that Tobi and Deidara's partnership was several months old, the disgruntled pair had been sent trekking after a giant demonic turtle. Which, in Kisame's opinion, was possibly the most idiotic move that the Leader had made in regards to the team yet, aside from forming it in the first place. It was true that the Fire Country's method of assigning bickering Genin to the same team had come to some phenomenal results in camaraderie. However, very rarely does the Fire Country assign that team and then tell it to go attack a four hundred thousand pound reptile with anger issues.

Nonetheless, Hidan, who had again managed to be base stationed when Tobi and Deidara were being forced into closer quarters, had told Itachi and Kisame over dinner that between Deidara's whining and Tobi's tantrums, the new partnership was looking like a disaster. "You should see their room," he had said with such a peevish chuckle that Kakuzu had rolled his eyes and threatened to scalp the silver haired missing nin if he didn't shut the hell up.

Kisame had thought then that it was only an exaggerated comment on Hidan's part. Religion fanatics tended to over exaggerate. That was a given rule for the title. But standing in the doorway of Tobi and Deidara's room, he silently made a promise to never take Hidan's gaudy comments lightly ever again. If Kakuzu really had been rolling his eyes that night, then it must have been because he had _no idea._

Tobi and Deidara's room was, in the simplest of terms, a _nightmarish fucking mess. _From where Kisame was standing in the doorway, less than inclined to go in further on his own, he could see blocks of unused clay scattered liberally around the room. Along the dresser, amid clothing on the floor, and practically filling the space between beds, everywhere. He was able to see both short black and long curling light hairs peppering the clay slabs closest to him, clinging alongside dust from kami only knew how long ago. Along the wall over the long double dresser that Deidara and Sasori used to share, there were also sticky yellow-white handprints that matched the hue of the clay, mostly on the right side of the room, and Kisame didn't know whether to credit them to Deidara being clumsy or Tobi trying to move the bricks.

Kisame was careful not to step into any of the small piles of laundry when he finally made his way further into the room; Tobi was still waiting to get in behind him. He had a feeling that those piles had probably been formed more by chance than by either of the room's occupants intentionally arranging them. It had never occurred to him before that either of his two comrades could be could fall under the category of slobs. The _idea_ of Deidara or Tobi being messy certainly wasn't surprising—after all, Sasori hadn't been one to complain over nothing—but somehow it still seemed strange to think that all of Sasori's intimidation could be erased so easily within a few short months. With Tobi, it was easier to imagine the mess happening, even if his former master hadn't said anything about cleanliness problems beforehand. Zetsu probably wouldn't have even minded all that much. But Deidara's regression...that was disheartening.

"How can you find _anything _in here?" Kisame said as he looked around the scattered mess of belongings. He spotted a red and black cloak on the ground in a crumpled heap less that an arm's length away from an overturned coat rack, complete with Deidara's seldom worn hat laid across its hooks.

Tobi padded into the room around him, and Kisame noticed that even he watchfully directed his feet to land around the clutter, just avoiding stepping on a dark sleeve that reached out into the walking space in front of the doorway from under one bed. He recognized it for its buttons as the scout's original self-made scout uniform.

The newer agent sheepishly adjusted the side of his mask, head turning as he glanced over his bedroom. "I know it's messy. We're, uh...still getting used to each other."

Kisame took his eyes off the coat rack, turned them back on the beds. Both were unmade, one with its sheets peeling away from the mattress from going so long without being made, and Kisame involuntarily wanted to straighten it. Tobi was standing in the narrow space between them, head slowly turning over the mess.

"I can't even tell which side is yours," Kisame said, even as he took another small step away from the door.

"We're not really sure about that either."

Kisame stopped again in front of the bed. "You don't even know which bed you're sleeping in?"

"Well..." Tobi leaned back against a section of the dresser that had fewer of the moist clay bricks. He pointed to the far side of the room. "That one over there always used to belong to Deidara-sempai, but the one on this side," his mask turned to the side that Kisame was standing on, closest to the door, "used to be Sasori's."

"That's right..." Sasori had always preferred to sleep in the bed closest to the door incase Deidara finally succeeded in blowing up something flammable inside their room. "So...?"

The masked ninja paused. "Do you have any idea how hard Sasori's bed is?"

Kisame blinked. He glanced down at his hand, which had somehow gotten to resting lightly on the mattress with the edge of the sheet between its fingers. Apparently, he had begun stretching it back to cover the entire mattress. Other than the sheet needing to be washed as well as straightened though, he didn't notice anything unusual.

"Sasori was a _puppet!" _Tobi hissed opposite him. "He didn't feel anything shot of _termites_ anymore! When Leader-sama was stocking his room, I think he might have just given him the cheapest thing he could find _because_ he knew Sasori wouldn't complain."

"...Well, I doubt he'd think you wouldn't complain. He would probably get you a new one if you asked," Kisame said as he watched the younger missing nin sullenly cross his arms over his crest, mask angled to the floor.

"That's what Kakuzu said," Tobi responded on a sigh. "But then Deidara-sempai over heard us, and he said he wouldn't let me get rid of his 'danna's' bed, and so I told him that if it meant so much to him, _he _could have it—"

"So why aren't you sleeping on that side of the room?"

Again, Tobi's mask was facing the floor, and from the close set of his arms still folded over his upper body, that Kisame momentarily pictured the other sticking his tongue out. "Deidara can't sleep on it either," he said sullenly. "He's being stubborn about, but I can hear him rolling over all night, and that just makes him grumpy when he gets up in the morning, so I told him that if he wasn't going to replace that bed, he might as well keep his old one and _I'd _do it—"

"So who's sleeping in the other bed?"

Tobi looked up at him, unreadable. "At the moment..." the answer faded until it disappeared completely. It was replaced a second later by a convinced, "He's just being stubborn, Kisame-san."

Kisame resisted the urge to make a snide comment about hypocrisy. Just barely. "...Of course he is," he said, and then finally dropped the sheet and stepped away from the puppeteer's former mattress. Glancing around the room again, the shark nin wondered how long he would have to be there before Tobi would give up looking for his masks in his own room. Hopefully not long, considering that the former scout hadn't moved from his chosen place in the clutter since he'd walked in. "Did Zetsu tell you where he was going to put the masks before?" the shark nin asked to fill time.

Tobi kicked one pile made from two overlapping garments on the floor half-heartedly with his toe. "Yeah, he said he'd put them in the closet, but Deidara didn't notice anything in there when he looked earlier."

Kisame glanced to the side. "Well, he might have missed them."

"I don't think he would," Tobi said softly. He hesitated, or Kisame assumed he did by the amount of time that passed before he added, "He keeps, well...a lot in there."

Kisame looked at Tobi questioningly.

A moment passed. "Um...you see, when I was moving in," the scout started slowly, but then he stopped. Looking toward the closet, Tobi stalled again before finally taking a step out of the channel between beds. As he approached the double closet, one hand rose to nervously tug at the side of his mask again. Kisame decided to brave the dangers of whatever might be hiding in the old clothing and clay on the floor to come up behind him as the other agent carefully slid one door open. "He didn't tell Kakuzu about this, you know..." Tobi said hesitantly.

Kisame looked. Nothing particularly unusual jumped out at him at first. The clothing hangers were all in use and tightly packed together, forming a mass of red and black patterns. There were boxes along the bottom of the closet, and Kisame was just about to ask Tobi how he knew his masks weren't inside any of them when the other nin reach in to pick out a hanger, and in doing so shuffled the garments just enough for a small wooden head to flash briefly between coats.

"Is that a puppet?"  
Tobi had to use both hands to pull out the garment he wanted without also upsetting two others in the process. "Uh-huh," he muttered in response. He stepped back from the closet door. "Sasori didn't have it finished before the mission in Suna, so he didn't have it with him when he...you know."

"So Deidara kept it?"

"Yeah." Tobi took the cloak off its hanger and held it up by the shoulders, and then was quiet. Kisame didn't know what the younger ninja was waiting for until he looked down at the offered garment, and even then he only frowned at the peculiar size. Too narrow in width to be Tobi's, too short to be Deidara's.

"It's Sasori's," the former scout announced for him after the shark nin's head had only been turned for a few seconds. "Sempai has two more puppets and more poisons than I think he can even name packed up in there." Letting his arms down with a shoulder of the cloak still clutched in each hand, Tobi's shoulders slumped. "I think he did it at first to make sure that Kakuzu wouldn't sell any of it, but now I can't fit any of my stuff in here."

Kisame glanced over at the closet again, then at Tobi. "Why didn't you tell anyone Deidara was hoarding Sasori's belongings?"

Tobi sighed. "I haven't been base stationed with Zetsu-san since I joined."

"Did you think about telling anyone _else?"_

The orange and black spiral of Tobi's masked peered levelly up at him, and Kisame couldn't figure out whether he was supposed to interpret it as a confounded stare or a loaded indication that he w_as _telling someone.

Suppressing the urge to sigh himself, Kisame ran a hand through his hair. "You should tell the Leader about this, then this will get cleared up—"

"None of it would be a problem if Leader-sama let me stay with Zetsu-san." Tobi squeezed the edges of Sasori's cloak tightly enough so that there was a high chance of wrinkles after he rehung it. Even as he watched Tobi's shoulders slump yet again, Kisame hoped for the former scout's sake that Deidara didn't paw over his late partner's clothes regularly. He hesitated for a moment, not sure if he wanted to dig into where he suspected that comment might have come from. It really wasn't his place to; Zetsu would have been better. But eventually, he gave in to answering in spite of his better judgment.

Gently as he could without making any attempt to get closer to the other ninja, he offered, "Tobi, you know that Zetsu's a solo agent."

"So? At least we _could_ work together," the masked ninja insisted sullenly, and Kisame wondered in passing if he should try to get the other to sit down before he kicked the bedstead like an upset grade school student and ended up hurting himself. If not Zetsu's, he decided, then listening to Tobi's problems was definitely Deidara's job. To Tobi however, he only pointed out, "But the missions that Zetsu takes don't need two people. The ones that Deidara takes do—"

"That's easy for you to say," the younger organization member muttered darkly. "You already have a great partnership with Itachi. Everything between you is already all settled and _perfect_."

"I wouldn't say 'settled', exactly..."

Tobi brought his line of vision back up from the floor, orange mask tipping to the side in what Kisame interpreted as interest. However, Kisame noticed that while struggling to keep his mind set on the current situation. He wouldn't say the word "settled" in relation to his partnership with Itachi at all. At least, not after the last visit in the kitchen...

Tobi was still looking up at him expectantly with his head tilted. Kisame ran his tongue unconsciously over his lower lip. "Itachi and I..."

"Yes?"

"Well, we've..." Kisame started, but had to fumble for words, only to discover that his mind was a traitor when he couldn't fit words together in front of that unblinking orange faceplate. "You haven't..." His mouth moved on anyway, trying to explain himself out of the question despite his brain's refusal to help. The image of hot, black eyes swirled through his thoughts like cement that hardened unrelentingly around them.

"Kisame-san?" The angle of Tobi's head changed from inquiry to confusion with only a minor shift of his chin. "Is something wrong?"

It took Kisame a moment to shake himself, but at least while trying to firmly pull his mind away from the domineering lips of partner that were currently flustering his thought process, he managed to form a sentence. "Itachi and I have been working together for a longer time that you and Deidara. What we have in our partnership is different from yours, but that doesn't mean communication is any _clearer."_

Tobi's posture changed again immediately. The interest that Kisame had estimated a moment ago evaporated almost quickly enough to make him think that he could see it escaping into the air as the former scout dropped back into his sulking. "At least he's not making you uncomfortable or anything..."

Kisame almost winced.

"Deidara's almost made me... Kisame-san, did you just wince?"

Make that _did._

Again, Kisame's ability to think persuasively managed to escape him as he stared back at the unusually literal definition of an unreadable mask. Slowly, his line of vision shifted to the side until he was looking sidelong back at the crumpled far bed with its unmade sheets.

Tobi, in front of him, was quiet at first. Kisame wasn't sure how much time must have gone by with the lower ranking Akatsuki member looking at him, and him trying to shake off a faintly purple flush that he thought must have been visible in his face.

"Oh my god..." Tobi said crushingly when he finally made a sound. "Oh my _god."_

Kisame kept his eyes diligently on the mattress.

"You're attracted to Itachi...?"

"...Yeah," Kisame answered quietly. It took him a few minutes to persuade his eyes up to his comrade's mask. Knowing Tobi, he braced himself for an exclamation beforehand, but his expectation was not met.

Tobi's head was again angled in that way that meant he was looking at Kisame carefully. If Zetsu had been present, he might even have called it thoughtful, though Kisame had a hard time putting the word in a sentence with Tobi's name, even in his own head. When Tobi did speak, it was a level, curious, "For how long?"

To that, Kisame only blinked. That was a good question. Unfortunately, one that Kisame didn't feel like answering in this particular situation. "That's not really related to what we're talking about, Tobi," he said, but the other nin only stared at him. Kisame grumbled. "Awhile, alright?"

"You're a lot older than he is," Tobi said.

In response, there was another pause given over to the two ninja staring at one another, with Kisame only resisting the urge to snap that the other was taking a rather odd interest in the subject by a slender hair of good judgment. "It's not as bad now," he said to the orange and black painted headgear. "Itachi's not a teenager anymore. And even when he was, he always acted so much...older..." The answer trialed off. Kisame's second time doing so since coming into the room, though this time it nothing to do with his partner seducing his thought process. Shaking his head at his own feeble argument, Kisame looked at Tobi again and amended it, "Alright, that sounds a little too convenient. The truth is, I don't care."

Tobi's weight shifted to one side, giving off the faint impression that the masked ninja was uncomfortable. An effect that wasn't put off at all when Tobi raised a hand to ruffle the back of his hair. "To be honest, Kisame-san, I always thought Itachi was asexual."

"I always thought that he was straight," Kisame admitted.

He imagined Tobi giving him a look.

It was only after another few seconds had ticked slowly by, and Tobi tugged at the side of his mask again before he said anything. "What changed your mind?"

"Just speculations, I guess," Kisame said back. "Lately, I think I've been seeing...signs."

"Like what?"

Kisame glanced sidelong at the bed that used to belong to Sasori again, but was now being inhabited by his stubborn former partner. In his mind, he felt the warm lips opening against his again, and this time let the remembered sensation linger a bit before shaking it off. "Nothing, really," he said to Tobi before turning his head back away from the bed.

"It can't be nothing," Tobi sounded insistent now. "Are you going to...you know, try to do something?"

Kisame pinned the other shinobi with an opaque stare through the corner of his eye. Not as well done as what Itachi was capable of, but Tobi fidgeted nonetheless. "I'm going to go check to see if you missed your masks in Zetsu's room," Kisame said flatly. "You stay here."

Tobi exhale, and somehow managed to look disappointed with only moving his shoulders down a little. He didn't push the subject further thankfully though. "Okay, Kisame..."

kkkkkkkkk

Deidara's face was still lax from surprise after Zetsu left the kitchen. His mouth was open a little, as if saying something had crossed his mind but didn't go so far as to be acted on, and his eye still looked to where Zetsu had been in front of him only moments ago. Itachi watched the blond, waiting to see if he was going to finally make some sort of reaction, and then finally turned away when he didn't.

So long as Deidara wasn't about to destroy something, he was fine with him catching flies in his mouth.

Itachi went back to the counter, where his cutting board was still set out from before the ruckus in the hallway. For the next several minutes, Itachi tried to get back to his work. He finished the naked onion that he had left out earlier, but had to stop to think for a moment to remember what was next in the recipe, when Deidara started moving around in the kitchen behind him. Every heavy step the blond made resounded in his ears, but when he finally turned around the artist was merely standing by the pantry, quiet, but with the expression on his face not quite inverted enough to be sulking. Itachi wondered why the blond was even still in the kitchen instead of downstairs banging on the Leader's door to have Zetsu stay if it was going to cause him so much trouble with Tobi, but chose not to break the silence by asking. When he caught the blond man's eye, the self-proclaimed explosion artist smiled back at him before turning and disappearing into the tiny room, leaving Itachi to wonder whether he should be worried about his unusually silent behavior.

By the time the artist came out, Itachi had gone back to the counter with three raw chicken breasts and a glass bowl of marinade that he had made before Kisame's trip to the grocery store earlier, whisking bubbles into the liquid marinade to get it ready to add in the vegetables. At the sound of Deidara's footsteps returning, he glanced over his shoulder again to monitor what he was doing, but only for a second. It was more with his ears than his eyes that he followed Deidara's progress to the microwave on the other end of the counter top, hearing the crinkle of plastic, the electronic beeping of the buttons, and then the sound of the little swinging door clicking as it shut.

Still watching the bubbles as they sprang up after his whisk when the sound of hard popping reached him, he uttered over his shoulder, "Popcorn?"

"I'm hungry, un. Tobi didn't want to stop anywhere before we got here," Deidara said, and from the distracted tone, Itachi guessed that the blond was watching the paper bag expanding through the microwave window.

_Pop, pop._

He chose not to make a response to the extra information added onto his comrade's answer. For awhile, likely less than a full minute, a silence fell that was only broken by the gentle ticking of the clock's needle-thin second hand, and the cracking of Deidara's exploding snack. When the blond crossed the room closer to him, footsteps still heavy and audible, Itachi glanced to the side but still didn't say anything. Tapping off his whisk, he set it in the sink, washed his hands one more time, and then began unwrapping the chicken packet.

"So..." Deidara said while Itachi was stretching out the first piece. "How are...things?"

_Pop, pop, pop._

"Fine." Through the corner of his eye, Itachi saw Deidara watching him as he ran the slice of chicken under the water and reached to the side to pick up a knife he had left out earlier.

"That's good, un." The blond blinked his eye. Then he looked down at Itachi's hands as he carefully found and cut out the veins and larger strips of fat in the peachy-colored flesh. For a second, when the other turned and walked away, the sharingan user thought that he was going to be left alone again. He was about to call over his shoulder to remind Deidara about his popcorn, still loudly sounding away from inside the microwave, but then, before Itachi had even finished the first breast, the sound of a drawer opening and closing hastily behind him announced that the blond wasn't going anywhere. In seconds, Deidara was back at his side with a knife of his own, reaching across Itachi's arm space to get a piece of chicken.

While trying to keep the long, black and red sleeves of his comrade's jacket from touching the meat, Itachi murmured sharply to the side, "Are your _hands_ clean?"

"Sure, un," Deidara said, lifting out a strip. Itachi still watched him nonetheless while the blond dug his knife in and began sawing along a line of fat, and silently decided that that would be Deidara's piece. Then as he glanced back at the package with the one remaining chicken breast (and pulled it a little closer to himself for safety), thought that Tobi might have to share it. Since before he'd been prepping for Zetsu's cooking chores the next night, he hadn't counted on the number of diners to change. With Kisame and himself staying, there were now three chicken breasts for four shinobi. Five, if one counted the Leader, but Itachi doubted he would be a problem since the organization founder rarely ate with his agents. How he got food at all was a mystery...

Deidara finally broke the silence, slicing through the Uchiha's thoughts like the knife that Itachi held did the animal fat. "So...you've seen it, un?"

_Pop, pop, pop, pop._

For the second time since the doorway earlier, Itachi found himself looking to the side in Deidara's direction to see a large blue eye fixed inquiringly on him. He thought about letting the question drop without an answer, but then looked down at the absent, jagged cutting of the chicken breast and thought that the Iwa runaway might cut a thumb off waiting for him to say something. He turned to lay the first clean chicken breast in the marinade bowl to absorb flavor overnight. One positive aspect of the extended base stationed period, he supposed, was that he'd be able to taste the result of his recipe tomorrow. Even if the shares were divided awkwardly. Picking up the third and last piece of chicken, he provided over his shoulder, "Seen what?"

"You know, un," Deidara looked to the side and nodded his head pointedly in the direction of the doorway where only a few minutes ago Kisame and Itachi had almost been caught a second time by the members of team 1i. _"It."_

Itachi turned his head entirely to the side so that he could frown at Deidara more easily.

...What?

"I don't know what you mean," he said, but Deidara was no longer looking back at him. Instead, the blonde's vision was finally focused on the sharp instrument busily slicing through a thin layer of perfectly useable meat.

Hastily, without looking up from his dangerously unorthodox shaving, Deidara elaborated, "It's alright. I saw you in the hallway earlier, un. I'm just curious...what does it look like?"

The second part of Deidara's statement, Itachi utterly missed. He stopped listening after the hallway, when his knife stopped moving on the third and last chicken breast, and he thought for just a split second that a thin layer of frost settled on the back of his neck. "You saw...?"

"Yeah," Deidara answered busily, "not as much as I would have liked though." Flinging a piece of ruined, ragged meat into the sink, Deidara went on, "Un, I didn't think it would be this hard getting him to show me. He never seemed like he would be so stubborn about who he showed it to, but you know, un, every time I've gotten around to asking him about it, he just won't _take it off."_

The long canary-yellow bangs effectively restricted Itachi's view of the other's face when he turned to stare at his longtime comrade. Silently, he told himself to get his mind out of the gutter. There was no way that Deidara could be talking about...

"Un, I don't even need to see for that long. I can guess what everything looks like, but I still want to _know. _Five seconds in the closet would be okay, so long as he'd just let me get a good look."

_Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, POP!_

"Un...I think I might even try walking in when he's taking a shower if he keeps this up."

If Itachi's hands weren't bone-white by nature, he had a feeling that they would have been then. The chicken (regrettably bruised now; he made a mental note to give that piece to Kisame) hung limp and clammy between his fingers as he looked at the oblivious blond still ignorantly hacking away at the second piece. "Deidara, are you—"

"I'm not jealous!" the blond cut in hastily. He gave Itachi a quick good-natured smile that lasted just long enough for the Uchiha to take in the deep rose color dusting his comrade's face before he turned back to the sink and his steadily shriveling piece of chicken. "Un, but would you mind telling me, does he have one or two...un, you know..."

_"What?"_

"I know it's a weird question, un, but he just won't _show_ me." Deidara flicked his hair with a jerk of his head, so that his bangs fell somewhere closer to his ear and left his profile more open to examination. "It's driving me insane, un. I bet he _does_ have two!"

_Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!_

The sink faucet, still running from when Itachi was actually cleaning the chicken, was beginning to rise from the pile of wasted meat Deidara was tossing in too close to the drain. For one brief moment, Itachi had the unwanted inclination to drop his own piece of chicken into the rising water and tackle Deidara with his own knife in hand. He'd been momentarily surprised by the urge.

"Un...he probably keeps the other one covered up to throw everyone else off," Deidara was saying with complete conviction, unaware of anything Itachi was doing as he whittled away the strips of his dinner.

Wait...what?

Frowning again, if he had stopped at all since the conversation began, Itachi reached out in front of him to nudge off the flow of water with his wrist. Deidara didn't raise his head from his self-taken task, which was probably for the better. Taking care to make sure his voice didn't come out as confused as he was sure his expression was, Itachi prodded slowly, "Deidara...what are you talking about?"

_Pop, pop, pop, pop...pop...pop, DING!_

Deidara looked up, one yellow eyebrow arched. He looked surprised. "Un? Tobi's face," he said clearly. "We've been working together for months now, and he still hasn't..." as he stared, confusion gave way to a frown on the blonde's face. Itachi wasn't aware he was still crushing Kisame's chicken breast over the sink. "What's wrong with you, un? What did you think we were talking about?"

Itachi blinked, turned his look into a glare to throw off attention. Even so, the artist's focus didn't change; it stayed rooted on Itachi's face, where he was fighting back a wave of blood trying to take up residence in his face, stubbornly resisting orders to return to its normal circulation.

"Nothing," he said shortly, and then turned away to see what he could save of his mistreated chicken breast. But as soon as Deidara turned to get his popcorn, he glanced back at the clock hung near the door to see where the hands were, and just how much longer he had to go before sleep shift. If there was any truth to the civilian folktales about a god of some sort celebrating his birthday or whatever it would be tonight, he hoped that it would kindly keep Deidara out of his sex life, most notably by keeping him from putting together what he had been saying aloud.

kkkkkkkkk

Without another word being spoken after announcing his escape route, Kisame had turned and made his way back out into the hall, navigating his way through the obstacle course of Deidara, Tobi, and Sasori's scattered belongings. He might have hurried to the kitchen, or back into his room to sit down for a little while (his foot was beginning to ache a little), but as soon as he closed the door behind him and turned around, he found himself staring at a pair of familiar green leaves as the organization's most floral member hastily stepped back from walking into him. Zetsu, a clear water bottle uncapped in his hand, had been coming down the hall, apparently unnoticing of the doorway of his former pupil's room opening in front of him.

Zetsu hurried back from collision, and then took two steps more before hitting the wall, and nearly, very nearly, winced at the impact. Kisame had only taken one, as was needed, and then frowned. Though not at the distance, or even the unusual indication of pain. Rather it was because when the Grass nin's leafy head had been almost directly atop of his, he'd caught a whiff of something unusual in the air hovering between his friend's face and his own. Watching the Grass shinobi pat himself down as if checking to see if anything had broken, Kisame deliberately scented the air again. As far as Kisame's nose went, he knew that it wasn't any keener than most; not when he was above water at any rate. Submerged, he might have been able to pick up the smallest drop of blood breaking surface using his nose alone. Above water, however, Zetsu's nose probably had better reception. Not that there was any difficulty picking up the heavy sharp scent in the hallway now, concentrated not unnoticeably on one black and white mentally divided individual.

Zetsu's hand hastily launched toward its counterpart with the bottle's cap, black and white limbs working together to hurriedly seal the contents off. His voice was perfectly calm when he spoke though, as if entirely disconnected from his twisting hands. "Hello again, Kisame."

"Hi, Zetsu."

"Shouldn't you be lying down?"

"I'm fine," Kisame shifted his weight as discreetly as possible from his bandaged foot and made a mental note to ask Itachi if he knew where the painkillers were later. "Shouldn't you be packing?"

"We are fetching something for Leader-sama so we can continue with our briefing," Zetsu said in his unchanging voice, but with the bottle tucked between elbow and torso, the Grass nin pulled back a flap from the front of his cloak to pat along the inside. Something shiny winked out.

Kisame inwardly groaned at himself for asking, since curiosity seemed to be controlling his night like a puppeteer from an offstage alcove, but couldn't help it. "What's that?" he asked, then as if on a passing thought when the other's answer to his last question occurred to him, "You're _still _briefing?"

It wasn't a difficult mission to explain. Lift this, throw that, watch this, stab that, bite out the Tea Country lead's throat if he looked suspicious. A ten minute conversation at most.

Zetsu answered Kisame a little distractedly as he scooped out what looked like broken glass from a hidden pocket in his cloak. Several pieces clattered to the floor. "Crystal. One broke, but we should be okay. We have two."

"Why do you need crystal?" Kisame thought about adding a question on how the crystal could have broken to start with since they hadn't even brushed each other when he walked out of Tobi's room, but stopped when he looked down at one the pieces that had landed closest to him. One that had a certain sign worked into the glasswork that only one person in the Akatsuki would have been able to translate, who was at that moment some place thankfully far, far away. "Is that _Hidan's_ crystal?"

Zetsu said easily, 'Hidan is the only one we know who has crystal."

"I suppose..." Again, Kisame frowned as he looked at his friend. Taking another chance at stepping closer to him, Kisame again considered the heavy odor circulating in the air around his comrade. "So, you're going to the Leader's office with one wine glass between you?"

"That's right."

Kisame waited. "And...?"

"And what?" Zetsu held his small pile of glass in his hand, glanced down toward the ones still sprinkled on the floor near his feet.

"That's not water, is it, Zetsu?"

The plant man didn't even glance up. "No, it's not, Kisame."

Shifting his weight again, Kisame had to fight off a grimace at one of two images that floated through his head at that answer. He had seen what Hidan used those glasses for--a perfect violation of what would otherwise have been a beautiful set of cut crystal cups and glasses. He would sooner tear off a scale of his sword to use as a cup than take down one of Hidan's ceremonial vessels, personally, but given Zetsu's tastes, he might not mind at all. "Just make sure the glass is clean, alright?" he said when he finally responded, and swore that for a fraction of a second there was a very clear smirk on both sides of his comrade's face when he answered.

"Of course we will, Kisame."

The shark nin started walking to get around the leafy mixture of human and some sort of fly trap, but he only got four steps in before he heard his named called softly after him.

"Kisame?"

The shark nin turned his head. "Is something wrong?"

Glancing covertly down the hall in the direction of the Leader's staircase, Zetsu stalled for a moment, then hurried down the corridor toward him. Storing the bottle in the nook of his arm again, and giving Kisame a third fresh wave of that sharp scent that could only come from Fire Country sake, the Grass nin reached into another one of his pockets and brought out a tiny white plastic bottle. "Leader-sama had the painkillers in his desk," he said in what might have been the ghost of an earnest chuckle. Kisame blinked at him, thought about asking why Zetsu was even on that side of the Leader's desk, but he had no sooner taken the pills from his friend before the Grass nin turned and started back down the hall.

If it hadn't been from past experiences with silent, hard to read type comrades, Kisame might not have thought that as the Grass nin walked away, his shoulders were rigid with suppressed laughter at his long time friend and comrade's shocked expression.

kkkkkkkkkkk

It was half an hour after Deidara's bout of uncalled for questioning that Itachi's ears picked up the sound of the door swinging open again. He had been listening to the ticking of the clock and Deidara prattling about his last mission, sitting where Itachi had banished him while he tried to save what he could of the blonde's ruined chicken breast. Every few minutes, Itachi heard a soft click as Deidara leaned back in his chair, bobbing forward in intervals to take handfuls at a time from the popcorn bag he had ripped open on the table. When the sound of the door broke the routine, Itachi turned to glance over his shoulder in time to see Kisame pressing two fingers into the side of his head as he stepped over the threshold.

"I told you you shouldn't be walking around, un," Deidara piped before the door had even swung back into place.

Kisame glared lightly in his direction while he pulled out the chair next to the eccentric self-proclaimed artist. He was wearing his jacket now, and regrettably denied Itachi his earlier view. "I'm fine."

"You never took the pain medication, did you, un?" Deidara eyed Kisame, all four legs of his chair temporarily on the floor while his hand buried itself inside the open bag on the table.

Kisame shrugged. Itachi turned back around. Chicken scraps salvaged to the best that could be expected, he was now only left with the task of cleaning the dishes from dinner earlier in the evening, and what he had used preparing for tomorrow.

"I'll ask him for it before he leaves," he heard his partner say over his shoulder, and then heard a loud clack that told him that in the brief seconds that it took for him to look away and Kisame to answer, Deidara had begun to lean back in his chair again only to slam forward again abruptly.

If he suspected Deidara to make an amazing show of just how easily his mind rejected undesirable information (supposedly, he'd needed to watch the Suna authorities pry Sasori's corpse out from between his parents before he would even consider the concept of the Sand fugitive's death) by refusing to remember Zetsu's visit to the kitchen earlier, he was disappointed. Deidara sat quietly still in his chair beside the shark nin, lower lip caught between his teeth in one corner of his mouth, as he thoughtfully considered the air in front of him. Even when he spoke, his inverted attention was still evident. "When is Zetsu leaving?"

"Tonight," Kisame supplied simply, "that's when Itachi and I were planning to leave."

"But it's Christmas Eve, un."

"Actually, it's only Christmas Eve for another couple of hours," Itachi put in. He didn't need to, but his eyes drifted automatically up to the clock. With any luck, he and Kisame would both be in bed before the civilian holiday was even over. "The chances of him leaving before then are unlikely."

"Un..." Deidara's gaze shifted over to Itachi, but even as the younger of the missing nin spoke, his hand buried itself inside the popcorn bag. It was beginning to look empty.

Kisame, speaking to the back of Deidara's head but doubtlessly aware that the only person his question could apply to was Itachi, asked warily, "Has anyone told Tobi yet?"

Sometimes, Itachi wished that he could find a way to increase his chakra level to keep the sharingan active at all times. Regardless of how useful close observation was, the unrelenting fact that Itachi's eyesight was ever so slowly chipping away made it difficult to only have normal observation abilities. With the sharingan, picking up details, such as whether the drop in pallor that he thought he saw around Deidara's facial features, or whether his hand really did convulse for a brief second inside the popcorn bag, would be a less argumentative process with the assurance that what he saw through the red-washed pupils was not subject to imagination.

"Un...no," Deidara answered Kisame, though his face was still turned toward what looked like the space just next to Itachi. The sink, perhaps. But whatever the problem that Deidara seemed to be hinting at with his reaction, it seemed that it was not only his problem. Kisame's eyes had expanded from their unnaturally odd shape to what would otherwise be called a normal size, when the simple one word that had somehow managed to find its way to the main mouth on the blond ninja's person seemed to belatedly filter through the mind of its speaker. The silence that followed, for whatever reason that the two sitting at the table seemed to understand perfectly, but which looked somewhat over exaggerated to the one at the sink, was broken gently a moment later.

The former Iwa nin turned, and Itachi watched uncomprehendingly as his two comrades locked stares. "Un, where is he now?"

"In your room. I think he might have gone looking for Zetsu."

_"Shit..."_ Deidara pulled his hand out of the popcorn bag and let it fall heavily on the table. Letting the legs of his chair screech loudly against the polished stone floor, the blond stood up and began to leave.

"Are you going to go tell him?" Kisame said when Deidara pulled open the door.

"Un, no."

"Then where...?"

Deidara blinked at Kisame's confused expression, as if the question hadn't made any sense to him at all. "I'm going to go lock him out of our room so he doesn't break anything." Kisame and Itachi stared.

Then, as if to clarify himself on a side note, he added, "Un."

"You're not serious, are you?" Kisame asked, and Itachi noticed to himself that his partner's eyes didn't look like they were quite back to their normal size. Then he told himself to find a new focal point.

At the shark nin's question, Deidara paused for a moment with the door held open with one hand. He appeared to think about it for a moment, before saying with a slight hint to his expression that looked remarkably similar to Zetsu's before leaving the kitchen earlier, "You're right, un... I better lock him out of your room, too."

Then he quickly stepped out of the room and let the door slam shut behind him with a careless yank that made Itachi flinch from the clap-like jolt it shot into his ears. Impulsively, he glanced up at the clock on the wall again, counted the numbers. Just a few more minutes until sleep shift…

Deidara's departure resulted in another slightly stifling silence, reminiscent of the one that had been circling Kisame and Itachi like a bird of prey earlier, save for the fact that now there was double the reason for it. He didn't need to turn around when he heard it fractured by the familiar sound of a chair moving against the tile floor to know that Kisame was rearranging the blonde's seat at the table. "You're going to bleed to death if don't keep weight off that foot," he said when he looked back at the shark nin, and confirmed that yes, Kisame was resuming his earlier position at the table.

Kisame glanced back up at him from propping his bandaged foot on the seat of Deidara's chair. "I told you, I'm fine."

"Hn." Itachi kept his eyes on Kisame's foot for a few second longer. Regardless of what the shark nin insisted, the center of the now brownish stain was still a dusky scarlet that suggested the walk around the dormitory with Tobi had caused some setbacks in the healing process. He wondered if there was any chance it would scar later. When he got himself to look back up at his partner's face, it was to see the other looking back at him. And, from the particular way that Kisame's head was resting on the palm of his hand as he leaned onto the table top, he deduced that the shark nin was waiting for the inspection to be over. Their eyes met, and for exactly two clicks from the second hand of the clock, Itachi was indefinitely aware that neither of them seemed to be flustered. No blushing, no stuttered explanations. Just staring.

Kisame coughed, and Itachi tore his eyes away on the third clock click. Focusing on the soapy lukewarm water and several neglected dishes in the sink, the younger man plunged his hands in past his forearms. Kisame's chair shifted again behind him. Itachi counted the clicks of the clock to make sure that he had a firm hold on himself before he did something idiotic. Inwardly, he told himself to get a grip. He had been attracted to people before. He knew how to act, particularly if he wanted to strip the lower half of that person's body bare and throw them on the kitchen table. One thing that helped was not to start salivating after locking eyes. Picking up a dish from the bottom of the sink, Itachi fished out the sponge he'd left floating somewhere among the suds, and proceeded to keep off an awkward silence that might ruin the situation. "What was that about with Deidara?"

When he turned his head, he thought he caught Kisame looking at the curve of his back, but couldn't be sure whether to contribute it to the side of his mind that was desperately trying to revert back to the open-mouthed, yielding creature from the doorway over an hour and a half ago, or whether the other really had been looking. If Kisame had, it was only for a thin margin of a second before the shark nin straightened and looked once again at Itachi's face. Kisame was still sitting sideways, with his leg bent horizontally at the knee so his foot was set flat on the seat of other chair, and was likely doing little better than it would on the floor since Kisame's position didn't do anything to elevate it. Itachi's jacket was draped over a third chair opposite his partner, and their blond haired comrade's lay in a crumpled heap on the table near the abandoned bag of popcorn as a silent reminder that, though they were alone at the moment, Deidara was bound to return when there was food at stake.

While Itachi was glancing at the bag, Kisame cleared his throat to answer his question. "Tobi and Deidara have been having a few...issues at the moment."

"With trust?" Itachi asked nondescriptly. He let his mind drop guardedly back to the last half hour with Deidara.

Itachi turned around without consciously meaning to while he pondered his partner's claim. Whether attempting small talk or not, he was used to being productive. And so, when Kisame added, "Among other things," the younger man already had a dish brought up from the bottom of the sink in one hand and the regained sponge in the other. It was bothersome, but he was glad to have the habit a few seconds later, when the conversation took an unexpected turn. Otherwise, Itachi was partly sure, he might have toppled forward at how abruptly the subject of discussion was changed.

There had been another screeching scrape from the table, followed by a soft pat that sounded suspiciously like a foot being gingerly set down on the floor. Remembering Deidara's popcorn bag, he'd been about to tell Kisame that it would save them both a headache if the blond came back while the other's leg was still somewhat elevated, but he was cut off before the first syllable.

"Itachi... I think we need to talk about earlier."

Unseen by his partner, Itachi's hand paused in mid circle with the sponge inside a glass bowl he'd been using earlier. He was quiet.

Kisame went on after clearing his throat a little. "I wasn't going to ask, but after earlier..."

The shark nin trailed off before naming exactly which event from the evening he was concerned over. But given their last conversation, and the happenings since, Itachi had a likely guess. Eyes still on the wall above the sink, Itachi heard himself blurt, "What about it?"

Before Kisame responded, the clock made eight desultory clicks. Itachi didn't fidget, but he had a hard time restraining himself in the silence. This wasn't a topic that he had planned on addressing bluntly. He couldn't tell whether Kisame's pause was for contemplation or observation, or something else. For example, reluctance before asking an awkward question.

"Did you..._like_ it?"

Like that.

When two people are put together near constantly for almost a decade, at one point or another sensitive topics are bound to come up in conversation. In the eight years of their partnership, they'd covered the sharingan's weakness and the failing accuracy of Itachi's eyes, the Samehade's tendency to wriggle when Kisame was excited, and the long standing traumas resulting from the former exam systems of the Bloody Mist and sharing a locker room with Maito Gai; and, on one occasion when a snowstorm had trapped them in a Water Country inn with too much brandy on hand, had even discussed their former comrade's possible motives for gathering insecure young boys to his village. Sex however, possibly with the exception of one or two comments regarding their serpentine comrade during that three day snow-in in the Water Country, had been largely left out of their discussions. For his own part, Itachi didn't think that either of them had been particularly interested in what the other did in their bedroom, or with whom.

Kisame should have a guess about Itachi's sexuality, he thought. After all, he had seen it all. From the first girl, to Orochimaru. But he didn't know about Orochimaru of course, did he?

Behind him, Itachi again heard the sound of the chair scraping, this time longer to indicate that it was actually being pushed away from the table altogether. Itachi heard his partner's footsteps as the shark nin approached. Heavier on one side, lighter on the other. In his stomach, he felt the same condemning heat boil over. Kisame must have been able to feel it radiating from him in droves. Briefly, he had to wonder at how quickly his reactions to his partner had shifted. He must have had Kisame stand behind him over a thousand times before.

"Itachi?"

Itachi turned, and immediately felt his sense of direction dwindling away. Kisame wasn't even standing directly behind him; there were still easily two steps between them. Kisame was watching him openly while he waited for his answer.

Itachi resisted the urge to swallow; he made sure he didn't even blink. "Did _you?"_ he tried to answer levelly, but it sounded more like a challenge than anything else, he realized, even while he was saying it.

Kisame was watching his face while he spoke the two word response, just as opaquely as his leaf-loving friend, then slowly, he took two steps forward.

A hand touched Itachi's waist first, as if to test whether he would step back to get away, then came the familiar touch on his jaw, and then for the third time that night he was kissing his partner, with the damned mistletoe hanging innocently on the other side of the room.

And from there, "dwindling" turned to eradication. Before Kisame's mouth had settled over his, Itachi was aware of the slow withdrawal from his thought process in time with the progress of his unfettered hands searching for a hold in the course fabric of Kisame's cloak. He refused to call it pawing. When Kisame pulled his head up though, the collar of the taller man's jacket had been pulled down and was being restrained by Itachi's not entirely independent fist.

Itachi's attention focused on Kisame for split second after he raised his head, then with a blink and a turn of his head, he looked toward the clock on the wall. Kisame followed his line of vision, albeit more than a little confused at his partner's initial reaction to their first nonobligatory kiss.

_Three minutes._

"Itachi...?"

In a burst of rare, impulsive energy, Itachi sprang forward with his partner's collar still held tightly in hand. Kisame stumbled over the first steps, most likely because he wasn't expecting his smaller partner to make a dash for the door, or to drag the shark nin along with him. He recovered quickly. Had to, or risk being strangled by the constricting grip on his collar. A voice in Itachi's head piously pointed out that he was taking an enormous leap from one small step to another one that was easily seven or eight away by responding to Kisame's omission so readily; the shark nin's answer was just vague enough to leave the possibility of a messy outcome for a hasty reaction. But it revealed attraction, and that was good enough for the twenty-one year old former Leaf nin currently experiencing a rush of lust that hadn't hit him so abruptly since he was fifteen.

Kisame didn't seem to mind the sudden change in pace after he caught his balance again, anyway. There was another kiss outside the kitchen doorway, and then afterward Itachi had lost count. Kisame had scarcely passed under the mistletoe before his partner felt the tug on his hand as the shark nin stopped and pulled him back. Then there had been another when they rounded a corner and stopped in the middle of the walkway, dangerously visible for anyone who might have come up the stairs or out of a bedroom at that moment. And with one sloppy tilt of his head, Itachi had unintentionally created a small slit in his tongue on his partner's teeth; a hand had fixed itself to the back of his head after that, and the amount of suction in the shark nin's mouth became so hard the Uchiha murderer couldn't squash the impulsive reaction to groaned into it. Then there had been more eager tugging down the hall. Itachi had been pressed against the bedroom door when they finally managed to reach it, and by then both partners were already panting. It had been years since Itachi had kissed another man at length; he'd forgotten that there was so much more aggression that went into it. There was a struggle for dominance that took place in male kissing that Itachi, as reluctant as he was to use Kisame or Orochimaru as a standard, had decided was largely absent with the fairer sex. When Kisame trapped him against the door, both of them with a hand furiously trying to strangle the doorknob, his lack of practice lost him the battle.

And so it was that, little more than ten minutes after Deidara left the kitchen (and apparently, forgotten his promise to lock their bedroom door), Itachi tumbled onto his own bed with his partner on top of him. He had his hands tangled in Kisame's cloak as he sought out the buttons. Then he was fisting them in the tank top underneath, as if he were trying to pull the other man closer, even while their bodies touched and wrapped around one another.

Kisame was the one who finally broke their unremitting familiarization with each other's mouths. Cold air attacked Itachi's lips, and he could hear his own breathing in time with his partner's as they studied the flushed changes in the other's complexion. Very faintly, Itachi could smell blood on either his partner's breath on his own, unable to decide given their closeness. The break was only temporary though. Itachi only allowed enough time for an inhale before he lifted his head off the pillow and latched onto the hallow of his partner's throat, nibbling and sucking even as he felt the tendons moving under the skin as his partner shifted to make him more comfortable. Itachi let his mouth wander along the area, and briefly wondering how much effort it would take to leave a mark on the other's unusual skin. He couldn't remember whether he had left any long last marks on Orochimaru's body, though he remembered a number of odd looking bruises on his own that had last for three of four days afterward. Without meaning to, even as Kisame angled his head encouragingly for him to continue, Itachi thought back to the pale lithe body that had shown him what to do the last time that he found himself pawing the line of skin between a comrade's shirt and pants.

A large hand drifted down Itachi's body, more at ease than the Uchiha's aggressive movements. Itachi was still gripping his partner's clothing, though an impatient hand of his own had already taken the imitative to weasel its way under the shark nin's risqué tank top and was currently raking along heated rough skin while its owner was busily occupying himself with the less than gentle worrying of the skin at the base of the shark nin's neck. Nonetheless, when a set of fingers, and then a palm, ghosted leisurely over a different area that was rapidly rising in terms of awareness, a moan bubbled up unabashedly from Itachi's throat. He pressed back toward it encouragingly, but the curious hand was only there long enough to suggest moving forward with its featherish exploring, before...

_Knock knock knock..._

"Un? Kisame? Itachi?"

Itachi's eyes snapped out of their half lidded state, saw Kisame's do the same. A mutual look was shot toward the door which, even in the rustling of getting from the hallway to the bedroom, Itachi distinctly remembered turning the lock on for before Kisame pushed him back onto the nearest bed. The door rocked audibly in its frame as their comrade presumably continued to knock. After a few seconds, Tobi could be heard. "Deidara-sempai, maybe they're not in there."

Several faint wet slaps followed.

"Sempai?"

"Get back, _baka."_

Kisame and Itachi were still tangled with one another when they heard the sound of several heavy steps, as if someone were hastily scrambling away from their door. From what drifted through the wooden barrier, Itachi thought that Tobi must have run all the way back to his own room on the opposite side of the hall. He had just enough time to glance up at Kisame and see that his partner was reflecting the same suspecting expression back at him, before the their bedroom door flew off its hinges in a loud, sudden burst of splintering wood and flinging bits of clay.

Fortunately, suspicion and Deidara's biting warning to Tobi had been enough to break both ninja back into their senses. At the first sound of the door splitting, Itachi abruptly let go of his partner's clothing, allowing Kisame to throw himself at the opposite side of the bed and cross his legs before the ruined fragments of their door had finished landing on the floor. Itachi did likewise. He wondered whether Deidara thought anything when he leaned through the empty doorframe to find both him and Kisame sitting on the two farthest points of his bed, legs crossed in the same concealing position. The answer was probably no, he thought.

"I told you that was too much clay..." Tobi uttered quietly from somewhere unseen in the hallway. Deidara ignored him.

Stepping unabashedly into their room, and appearing unconcerned with the smoke coiling around him (probably used too it from his art to notice), the unconcerned blond who may have been insane for not running from the look that Itachi could feel coming onto his face, smiled into the room. "Leader-sama wants to see you." Then with a glance toward the mess on the floor, added onto his announcement, "You might want to get new hinges too, un."

kkkkkkkkkk

Kisame's jaw nearly dropped. Sincerely and unintentionally dropped for the first time since that Christmas Eve years ago when he opened the base entrance and met two comrades _that no one would ever talk about within base walls again around Christmas time. _

It took Kisame a second to register what Deidara said after he stepped into their room. When he did, it was after Deidara had already padded in around the punctured, but mostly whole door that had been cast into the narrow walking space of their bedroom by the blast. Despite the explosion that had put it there, the door itself hadn't been completely destroyed. It was only along one side that small chunks of wood were missing, most notably a large fist-sized hole where the doorknob must have been. Where it was now that it had been fired into their room, Kisame had no idea; hopefully, it hadn't crashed into anything breakable. Looking at the battered wood, the shark nin had a feeling that come Kakuzu's next visit to the base, when he would be handed the list of requested expenses for repairs and supplies, the same door would be pieced together and hinged right back in place.

"Deidara," Itachi said tightly across the bed from Kisame while the shark nin was making his observations of the damage, "when someone doesn't answer the door, what do you do?"

"I already did knock," Deidara said quickly, missing the point of his comrade's mock question, but at least being sensible enough not to snap back at the red eyed glare he was receiving from an angered, horny, and visibly tense Uchiha. Though, he didn't think the latter descriptions had been noticed by the blond yet. Regardless, in the blonde's case, survival instincts were only able to hold so much sway against his stubbornly insistent nature. "You didn't answer, un."

"So you blew our _door_ in?"

Behind Deidara, Kisame could see Tobi peeking cautiously around the corner. Even if it was out of cowardice, Kisame partly thought that that was the wiser move for team 1i at the moment. He could see Itachi's eyebrow twitching from the strain of the muscle pulling it down into a look that, on some occasions, _had _killed.

"Un..."

It wasn't until he noticed Deidara's eye darting between Itachi and himself that it occurred to Kisame that he might not be wearing an exactly pleasant expression himself.

"I told him it was an invasion of privacy," Tobi announced from the hallway, having taken the steps necessary to glance into the room from the doorway, but still wisely maintaining his distance.

Deidara sent Tobi what Kisame assumed was a look over his shoulder by the way that the former scout sheepishly turned his head away. If he hadn't been so uncomfortable at the moment, Kisame might have found the wordless communication amusing. Shifting his weight to try to make the stifling result from the last five minutes less noticeable, Kisame tried to suppress the urge to glance sidelong at his partner. Instead, he called back Deidara's attention with, "What was it the Leader wanted?"

Deidara's blue eye swung to him, probably for the better, Kisame thought, given his simmering partner. "Un, I told you. Leader-sama wants to see you."

"Again?" Itachi answered quickly. He was as stiff as Kisame was, with his arms and legs crossed over his disheveled clothing. Though the color of his eyes and the much more threatening tension in his jaw struck a more frightening figure than anything Kisame thought he could have done at that moment.

Out in the hallway, Tobi continued to watch from a safe distance, quiet and out of attack range, the mask making it hard to tell what he was watching exactly. Kisame shifted a little again to cover things better, just in case.

"Leader-sama didn't say _why _he wanted you. He just sent us to get you, un."

"Um, actually Deidara-sempai...he said—"

"Tobi, no one can't hear you out there. Come in here if you're going to say something."

Tobi paused for a second in the hallway, pulling a little away from the door as if an unexpected shock had driven him back, and Kisame stared for a second before he realized that the stumbling drawback was not so much horror as something else. Kisame was only able to tell by the way that Tobi's head swung to look up at the door frame, then back at his partner. If nothing else, Kisame had to give Zetsu credit for instilling some manners into his former charge. If Deidara had had any observation abilities whatsoever, he would have already learned to interpret Tobi's body expressions, but he merely looked annoyed as he waited for his order to be followed. Kisame made an effort to sound less harsh when he called back, "It's alright, Tobi. You can come in."

"Um, thanks."

Kisame's assumption was answered with a daring step over the threshold of the doorway. Tobi's advancement however, was poorly rewarded when he had to confront the dispelling expressions sent to him by both his partner and his younger comrade still seated on the bed. Kisame saw Tobi's hand twitch, and guessed that it must have been aching to tug on the side of his mask for reassurance. The former scout turned his mask pointedly toward Kisame when he spoke. "Leader-sama h-has something to tell you about your sleep shift."

"Our shift stared two minutes ago," Itachi cut in almost before Tobi had finished the last hesitant syllable. It was to the new member's credit that he didn't flinch; to Kisame, the statement sounded like more than just a sharp contrast to the other's usual passive tones. Rather, it conveyed a clear, _'Now get the fuck out.'_

Tobi, astoundingly, held his ground. "Yes, but something's changed because of us, Leader-sama...said..."

And then whatever Kisame was feeling (sympathy for the mask nin that was easing his way into their room, worry for how Deidara and Tobi seemed to regard each other, or the lingering desire to push Itachi back onto the mattress), gave way to stark, unhindered dread as Tobi elbowed his way around his blond partner to get further into the room. Deidara's expression was slower to melt away, given the direction that he was facing, but as Tobi's head turned to address Itachi directly, and in doing so, allowed his eye the chance to sweep over the wall to his left, Kisame saw the knowledge click. It was a miracle for the blonde's character that he didn't run for the door. Itachi alone in the room was unaffected by the time that Tobi lapsed into silence; an inquiring raised eyebrow shot his way when Kisame managed to catch the Uchiha's eye said as much. He wanted to ask his partner whether he had been in their room to change cloaks at some point earlier, or whether Deidara was just that stupid. Kisame hadn't even noticed it when he'd stopped off in their room before going back to the kitchen earlier.

Deidara had used the wrong closet. And the door had been left wide open.

Even while staring at the pending dread of discovery, Kisame felt a small reserved part of him slap its figurative forehead in exasperation.

There was something incredibly remarkable about dejá vu. An idle part of Kisame's mind that had probably gotten to the point of being a little too jaded from spending over a decade in the company of people who were either insane or well past the length of their natural-born life, commented on the fact as he watched Tobi stand gaping at the open closet. Or more specifically, at the large cardboard box nestled not too discreetly on the floor. It was a wonder that Itachi didn't notice it; his closet was as ordered as Tobi and Deidara's was stuffed with the material possessions of a long dead comrade. Which was very, in both cases.

"What are you looking at?" Itachi demanded in his harsh tone that could have cut paper if given the chance, but he didn't receive an answer. Tobi looked at the closet, then, slowly, turned his head to look at Itachi, coolly staring back at him from the bed. He repeated the process. Then the former scout became rigidly still. He started to raise his hand, but gave it up and did exactly what Kisame had done when he first met Kakuzu and Hidan on Christmas Eve eight years ago: he keeled over to the side and fainted.

All three of the remaining conscious agents stared in open astonishment as Tobi hit first his knee, then the entire left side of his body as he came crashing down at Itachi's feet. Kisame caught Deidara's eye when the black-clad body hit the floor, and managed to exchange two short corresponding glances with him before either of them made a verbal response: _Did he just...? _And _Yes._

Before the muted surprise could settle into a long silence, Deidara spoke first, by way of a low grumble as he toed the side of his partner's arm. "Un, you can't be serious... What kind of missing nin _faints?"_

With an irritated look, which Kisame thought might have been rigged deliberately to attract attention to himself and away from the open closet, Deidara dropped to the floor beside Tobi, grabbing a fist full of the black material of the other man's shirt with an overdone flourish and shaking him lightly. "Un, Tobi? Wake up."

The masked man didn't move.

When Kisame glanced to the side at his partner again, the Uchiha was watching the two with a frown on his face, though thankfully not the same death-threatening one that he had given to Tobi a minute ago. When he noticed Kisame's attention on him, Itachi's expression changed. It occurred to Kisame, that as confusing as Tobi's reaction was to the other two ninja in the room, it must be twofold for Itachi, who, to the best of the shark man's knowledge, was still unaware of anything sinister lurking in his closet. The look that he gave Kisame, with the irritation from a few seconds ago still attempting to linger after the loss of its focus, voiced his question clearly.

He considered hissing Itachi a hint to look in his closet, but then glanced at Deidara again and decided he wouldn't be that cruel. Shaking his head, he leaned a little toward his partner, and was mildly dismayed to find that Itachi's lips were starting to darken from earlier. Itachi must have shot him a look during the three second lapse that followed that discovery; the noticing of the faint suggestion of bruising somehow taking him much longer than it should have under any different circumstance. There was no way Itachi could have _not_ noticed it—but when he finally got to drawing his eyes up from the other's mouth, the expression waiting for him was completely unchanged.

"Maybe you should go meet Leader-sama. You know how he is about promptness..." he offered quietly, though less focused on speaking that what would have been wise.

Itachi apparently, had been expecting something else in response to his unspoken inquiry. He didn't say anything, but his swollen-lipped frown deepened.

On the floor, Deidara, unable to wake his partner with voice alone, was glowering at the unconscious ninja. Kisame was glad to see that the blond had at least been kind enough to roll the masked agent onto his back before he started shaking him again. However, patience had never been among Deidara's strong points either. Kisame had barely turned his head from making his suggestion to Itachi when the blond jerked back from shaking his partner's shoulder and, with barely a second's worth of time to consider, swung back his hand and slapped Tobi across his ear.

Kisame blinked.

"Come on, un!"

Other than his head swerving from the contact, Tobi still didn't move.

Beside him, Itachi said, "If Deidara kills him, Zetsu will swallow you whole."

Kisame winced. "I'll handle it."

Itachi and Kisame exchanged another glance, this time harder for the shark nin to read. Itachi's line of sight only traveled to him by moving into the very corner of his eye, pale face still angled toward their other two comrades. It lasted for less time than it had taken Deidara to swing his hand at his partner's unmoving head. Then, without a word to deter attention from the engaged blond as he rose and stepped around him, Itachi made his way to the door.

Kisame inwardly waved goodbye to another passed opportunity as the door shut behind his partner, even as Deidara's head shot up at the sound of the door clicking. The shark nin knew that his comrade's attention focused on him immediately, but he chose to ignore the fact for a moment. Standing, Kisame stretched out muscles to work out the remaining kinks from earlier, simultaneously prolonging the time that Itachi had to get out of ear shot before their loud comrade could start speaking.

But again, Deidara was not a creature of patience.

"Why was the door open?" the blond demanded before the former Mist shinobi had even had a chance to finish massaging his lower back.

Kisame shot him a confounded look, a knockoff of one that Itachi used whenever he was inclined to question someone's intelligence level but was too well raised to do so bluntly. "You left it open," he pointed out, straightening.

"And you didn't notice, un? What were you doing in here?"

Kisame met that question with thoughtful silence, and relied on the blonde's short attention span to cover it. With any luck, the months spent chasing Tobi hadn't made that big of a dent in Deidara's personality yet.

"We're lucky Itachi didn't say anything, un," Deidara said before the pause in conversation became long.

Kisame began to let out his breath. "Where are you going to move them?"

"Move them, un? I can't move them!" Deidara glanced down at Tobi. His hand was still on the masked nin's shoulder from his more aggravated efforts to wake his partner up. "He might _notice," _the blond said quietly over the unmoving form.

"Yeah, so will Itachi," Kisame countered. "You have to get them out."

Before their partnership had fully established itself, Kisame remembered Sasori complaining about his partner's reasoning methods; he'd wondered if it was cultural or just a coincidence that Deidara's head was just as hard as the name of his former village. "We haven't had a discussion yet that hasn't turned into an argument," the Sand shinobi had said, "it's like banging my head against a stone wall." In the present, Kisame was beginning to see what Sasori had meant. He could almost see Deidara's skull becoming thicker and grayer as he stubbornly stared up at him. "Where else can I put them, un? Kakuzu and Hidan lock their door, and Zetsu hasn't left yet. If he's ever going to, un."

Kisame considered saying 'You can clean your closet', but dropped that suggestion almost as quickly as it came. The last thing he needed was to mention a subject still as sensitive as Sasori and have Deidara fly into a defensive grief-induced fit. He settled instead on, "You could give them back." Then seeing how Deidara's face darkened, added a jibing, "You don't actually think he's going to kill you over them, do you?"

Deidara's reaction was as quick as he expected it would be. "Of course not!" the blond snapped. "Un, Tobi's just..." a pause, grabbing for words, "..._really_ annoying."

Kisame waited for a moment to see if there was anything more to sentence after "annoying" to specify exactly what aspect of his partner the blond was talking about, before he realized that Deidara was being general. Then he began to sigh. A tiny, rapidly growing part of him missed Sasori more by the syllable. But before Kisame could take a breath to frame a reply to the childish blond form on the ground, the string of their conversation was abruptly severed by Tobi's head turning.

Deidara had been staring up at Kisame when his partner's head finally swerved of its own accord to stare up at him, and as a result, it was likely more of a shock to him when he heard the outraged question almost screeched up from his lap, "You stole my masks?!"

It should be noted about Tobi that he had been with the Akatsuki for a very long time. He was loud, he was clumsy, he was juvenile, but including the years that he had spent faithfully trailing Zetsu through his apprenticeship, he was also one of the oldest members of the organization. He had been trained by one of the most unnoticeable listeners that any village had ever missed seeing. It really shouldn't have been so surprising that Tobi had picked up a talent for eavesdropping. The key words of that thought being _shouldn't have, _of course

"You're _awake?" _

"Do you have any idea how terrified I was? I thought Itachi took them!"  
Tobi pushed himself up from the floor and out of Deidara's grasp without pausing, or even showing the tiniest hint of puppyish elation that he had successfully fooled both his comrades. He didn't even turn his head to look at Deidara as he sat up, the side of his head that was still probably a little pink around the ear from the slap earlier facing the blond. Barely a second passed before, "Why would _Itachi_ take your masks?"

"I don't know!"

For a moment, Kisame thought that there would be glimmer of an adult-worthy conversation. Tobi's voice was at least a quarter horror when he made his exclamation. Maybe even a fraction anguish. He raised an eyebrow at it, taking a step closer to the other shinobi so that he would be ready to intervene if he needed to—but also for the sake of listening in on their conversation as well. Unfortunately, Deidara's train of thoughts went in a different direction.

"Everyone knows the only person who's _worthy _is your precious Zetsu!"

And childish conversation policy of team 1i was reinstated.

Tobi, who had been sitting on the ground beside the Iwa nin, though with his shoulder and faintly pink ear out of reach, visibly jerked. "Are you still angry about that, sempai?" he asked softly, then swerving his head so that the swirl of his mask faced Kisame, he said, "This is exactly what I was talking about."

From where Kisame was standing he saw the position of Deidara's head change, like the cocking of a gun. "What's that?" he asked guardedly.

"Deidara-sempai, you've been doing this for months—"

"I wouldn't have to if you would just take it off, un!"

"The answer is still _no, _Sempai," Tobi said firmly, and then he pushed himself up from the floor. He turned away from Deidara, the stance of his body saying as clearly as his actions that as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over. It was by far the most adult action Kisame had ever seen Tobi make. If he looked in the shark nin's direction as he stood, it was impossible to tell; the black clad ninja only gave a clipped, "Excuse me" when he went to go into Itachi's closet. Despite whatever squeamishness he might have had about the Fire Country murderer, it appeared not to take effect when the murderer wasn't in the room. He knelt down and the gathered up the box with its feeble message of impending doom, one of Itachi's sleeves snagging momentarily on the corner as he straightened and began to back out of the small space. He had just turned to step over the threshold when Deidara rushed forward toward the closet, almost diving in when he stopped in the doorway.

"You're being such a little kid about this, Tobi, un."

"Sempai, you're the one who _stole _my _masks!" _Tobi bellowed infuriately. And just that simply, the adult image was again overthrown by the juvenile that had shadowed the Akatsuki for years. "You have no respect for personal boundaries!"

"I wouldn't have to if you would stop making such a big deal out of it."

"You're the one who's...! DEIDARA-SEMPAI!"

Kisame let his awareness the conversation dwindle momentarily when he massaged his temple. Neither Tobi nor Deidara was know for exercising control over their volume whether in passing or locked in argument. There was a headache threatening to take hold. He brought his eyes back up to the closet when he heard Tobi's outcry and saw Deidara, still standing braced and ready for attack in the doorway, leaning in through the door frame as he hissed his point. "This is serious, un. I need to know what you look like."

_"Why?" _Tobi answered back sharply. "None of our comrades have ever had a problem with this before. It's _personal, _sempai." The last was added with a sullen gesture toward the former scout's face and it's brightly colored covering, though made rather difficult to interpret since the former scout's hands were currently full.

Deidara abruptly let go of the door frame, and Kisame, standing with the blonde's back angled toward him, was able to see his hands come up as if the former Iwa ninja was planning to try grabbing his partner by the face or shoulders but wisely restrained himself mid way through. "But I'm not just your comrade, I'm your _partner!"_ Deidara stated loudly. "Itachi doesn't wear his sharingan around Kisame." There was a pause, and Deidara leaned back out of the closet to look over his shoulder, "Does he?"

Kisame, who had been convinced at that point that the two ninja arguing in his partner's closet had completely forgotten he was there, had to take a second to blink. "No, but that's because maintaining it takes up an impossible amount of—"

Tobi tried to weave to the side while his partner's head was turned. Deidara's attention snapped back to the former scout, throwing his weight against the wall to keep him from moving. Even from where he stood, Kisame could clearly see Tobi's fingers digging into the side of his cardboard burden in annoyance. No one could ever deny that Deidara was stronger than he looked. Brute strength was not featured in most of his attacks—at most, Kisame would say it was saved for back up tactics, in the event that his art and his speed were not enough to save his life in a worst-comes-to-worst situation. It was still there though, a small skill that had delighted his former partner when put to work on transferring the bodies that he later turned into puppets. But, no one could also deny that in that one area, Tobi was still better with his larger build. A quick ram forward, and Deidara had to stumble back to keep from falling off his feet. "Sempai, I'm _not_ having this conversation with you," Tobi ground out as he forced his way back out into the main part of the bedroom.

After recovering with a glare, Deidara still blocked the space in front of him, even with the lost ground. It was becoming increasingly clear that if Tobi held onto his determination to walk away, he was going to have to buffet his way to the door. And from the rigid tension that Kisame was able to see stiffening the newer agent's shoulders when Deidara managed to drive him back a few steps, he had a feeling that Tobi was just fine with that. He was torn between wanting to intervene and wanting to let the battle of wills continue. Confrontation was good for a new partnership, particularly one that promised as much conflict as this one seemed to, but still a voice hissed that he ought to at least herd the two ninja over to his side of the room before something of Itachi's was broken.

Tobi, probably trying to gauge where he should try to push pass his partner, took another careful step back into the closet. The two ninja seemed to have once again forgotten that Kisame was there. The black haired youth, currently bereft of his cloak, appeared to brace himself as Deidara took the given ground.

"What if someone tried to impersonate you, un? I won't know how to tell you apart!"

"Sure you will, Deidara-sempai," came Tobi silkily in response, "I'll be the one saying 'Hell no' when you ask us to take off our masks."

As Kisame moved to get around Deidara to another vantage point where he would have an easier view to monitor both members of team 1i, he saw that the one of Deidara's arms that was braced against the doorframe was beginning to grow tense. He wondered if Tobi noticed it too. He started to say something, but Deidara was already too caught up in the argument.

"What about Zetsu, un? He's seen it, hasn't he?"

"That's different, sempai," Tobi said stiffly.

_"How _is it different?"

Tobi's weight shifted impatiently from one side to the other as he took in an audible breath. "Sempai, let me out of the closet."

"Then take it off!"

"No!"

"Zetsu, un—!"

The moment when Deidara's head flung to the side surprised Kisame. From his vantage point, he could see the blond nin's face, as well as the back of Tobi's head when it happened. When the box hit the floor, he'd heard the solid _thunk_ of the cardboard and the clinking of the masks inside as they knocked against each other, and had even seen Tobi's hand clench, but somehow it was still a shock to see the black clad ninja excuse the attack. In a burst of fluid movement that _finally_ made sense of Zetsu's unfailing insistence in the scout's abilities, Tobi lunged forward and smashed his fist into Deidara's jaw in whirl of flying yellow hair and a shattered familiar word. And then there was dead stifling silence.

For a long moment, the room was completely still. The gusto that had spurred Tobi into striking seemed to vanish as quickly as the damage it caused was inflicted. In the stillness, Kisame saw Tobi's shoulders shrink back down to their normal slump as if a pinprick had deflated them. The former scout hastily drew back his arm to let it dangle loosely around his torso. Kisame had no doubts that if he had been able to see Tobi's face, it would have been set in the same unbelieving gape that he was probably wearing as well, as he watched the scene from over the former scout's shoulder.

One does not _punch_ Deidara.

One does not punch Deidara _in the face._

"One" shoulder never, ever mean "Tobi".

Deidara held the position that his body took after the unexpected blow for a few seconds afterward. His hand slowly rose to cup the space on his jaw where he would undoubtedly have bruise later as a memento of the argument held just outside Itachi's closet. Just as slowly, with his hair still disheveled and his ponytail overturned so that his it spilled messily over the left side of his face, he turned around. He was completely still, but Kisame had never seen Sasori's explosive, eccentric partner with his one eye looking so unnervingly insane; it was wide enough for Kisame to worry that his camera would pop loose. The look spread out on his face like a paper held out to a flame. Tobi started to say his partner's name, but Deidara raised a hand. With his palm facing toward the former organization scout, a long curving tongue that was usually reserved for shaping clay darted out to lick the nonexistent lips of Deidara's palm. Then...

"It's on now, bitch."

"You can _talk _with that mouth?!"

Deidara lunged at Tobi, still dazed and probably just as stupefied as Kisame at which orifice the declaration had come from. Both bodies half hit Itachi's bed frame, Tobi first with Deidara bearing down on top of him. They crashed onto it from mid chest up, and then quickly tumbled onto the floor. Deidara was straddling Tobi when they landed, though Kisame noted that Deidara strayed away from the conventional position. Rather than restraining him, he left Tobi's hands sprawled out where they had landed on the floor, while both of Deidara's splayed viciously over the sides of the masked nin's head, palms glued to the shape of his skull.

"Take it off, un, or I will bite off your ears!" Deidara growled, but Kisame thought wistfully, Deidara seemed to forget exactly what the shark nin had noticed: that Tobi's hands were left completely free and unhindered. Tobi attempted to strike Deidara again, even managed to land one punch, but despite however flitty Deidara's mind was, he was a sharp fighter. He caught Tobi's fist, releasing one ear to get it, and then was rewarded by the feeling of Tobi's mask slamming into his jaw line when his partner took the opportunity to headbutt him. Directly on the spot that was already tender from earlier too, Kisame suspected.

But while this was going on, however interesting it might have been, Kisame was not immobile. After the members of team 1i crashed onto the floor like a pair of barroom brawlers, he'd taken a moment to stare and acknowledge that now was definitely the time to intervene, before the two made a royal mess of Itachi's side of the room, which would in turn result in a very unhappy partner later when Itachi returned, and possibly hinder what had thus far been the best Christmas Eve spent base stationed yet. He knew better than to try to get between the two wrestling on the floor though. He had taken a moment to consider what would be the best method he could use, contemplate how long the two could hold their breath underwater, and then dully stepped around them to reach his own side of the room.

Every room in the dormitory hall had had some form of custom adjustments made only a few years prior. Particularly members with element-based attack techniques. It was one bit of common sense that the Leader had undertaken to satisfy Sasori after Orochimaru's betrayal. After all, it was a former comrade that knew of their location and was rapidly gathering the manpower that, if strategized correctly, could bring the organization to its knees. Hidan had a pair of throwing knives and, of all things, a ball of the oddest looking yarn that Kisame had ever seen, stashed in a secret compartment under his bed. Zetsu had a packet of soldiering pills and a pair of salt and pepper shakers hidden behind the largest sunlamp in his room. And, unless Deidara had allowed Tobi to choose his own supplies, in the bedroom just across from Kisame and Itachi's there was a box of poisoned kunai and pre-made clay sculptures hidden behind the headboard of one of the beds. In his own room, Kisame walked across to his dressed and matter-of-factly nudged it aside. Behind him, Deidara was wrestling too late to get Tobi's hands pinned under his knees. A process that was likely made all the harder since he was doing it with only one sharp-toothed hand at his disposal. Kisame had the dresser pushed aside and was unlatching a small cupboard near ankle level when the blond had managed to shove two fingers from his remaining hand underneath the plastic layer over his partner's chin. The shark nin noticed when he'd glanced back at the two, just in time to see Deidara clamp down on the bottom of his partner's mask, even as the other shinobi bucked and kicked under him. But even while he was watching them, Kisame's groping fingers found the handle of an iron faucet, probably one of the most expensive emergency preparations that the Leader had made, but one that Kisame never tired of using. Turning the cross shaped nozzle, he heard the sound of water running through pipes underfoot, and then trickling onto the floor a second later. He turned it so that the water would reach the maximum speed level possible, and then waited.

Deidara had given up trying to drag Tobi's left hand under his knee. He pinned it to the floor, to side of the former scout's head, and instead focused on keeping his seat. Tobi likewise had his free hand wrapped around the wrist of Deidara's opposite hand which still stubbornly held onto his mask. It was probably the weight that betrayed Deidara. As Kisame watched, Tobi's body below the shoulder went limp for a second, and then with a sharp jerk of the entire right side of his wide dark form, he sent Deidara onto his back with Tobi lying atop him. Deidara's head knocked the nightstand, hand still under his partner's mask even with after the change in positions. And from what the shark man could see, despite the former scout's efforts, the move had, if anything, pushed his partner's fingers further under the protective plastic surface of his face cover. The blond smirked, but that was probably because he didn't see the lamp wobbling on the edge of the bedside table; Kisame didn't think either of them did.

The blond gave a strong, final jerk on his partner's mask, and Tobi sprang forward along with it to keep the leather strap around his head from being torn off. It was probably out of dumb luck that he threw up his hand to steady himself, slamming his weight into Itachi's bedside table and sending the only source of light in the room tumbling to the floor. Kisame, and likely Deidara too, saw only a pale, thin slice of chin as their comrade bowed into the Deidara's pull, before the lamp shattered on floor and they were all plunged into total darkness.

Kisame's water supply was enough to suffice now, for which he was thankful for after two signs indicated the brawl was not over. With a weary sigh, he began forming the seals with his hand after he heard first Deidara's low growl of frustration, followed by a clear, smug, "Ha!"

kkkkkkkkkkkkk

Hello! I'm finally back with this story! Even if it is much later than I had anticipated. I'd been hoping to have the story done by now. : o All well, I guess...

I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed the last chapter! Really, I appericate every comment I get. If I could, I would given everyone a hug. Unfortunately, as all of you know, this is the interent and things like that simply don't fly here. So instead, you'll have to settle for my thanks, and imagine the pleading puppy eyes I'll be sending toward my email box after posting this installment of the story as I wait for more. (Heh, just kidding. Just so you know.)

Anyway, the next part should be coming considerably soon. (Really, I mean it this time!) I decided to shave off the end of this installment and the first part of the next one to make a mini in-between chapter, thus making the former five-part story into a six-part one. And hopefully, that will make it _seem _like things are moving along faster than they are. : D Yay.

Until then.


	4. 4 6

Itachi had had to enter the Leader's office after a long pause out in the tunnel-like hallway of the lower level. He had needed the time to lean against the frigid stone and try to slow his racing heartbeat down. His _still _racing heartbeat. When Itachi had leaned back against the wall just outside the Leader's door, he had been mildly surprised to find himself still unbelievably hot. As if having the one place in the base where he could have hoped to have privacy blown open without warning, listening to Deidara's mad raving of an explanation, and watching Tobi faint outside his closet hadn't been enough to break his mind away from peeling the tank top off his partner's shoulders. Or rather, it had been enough, if Itachi was being perfectly honest with himself. He remembered at least a three minute period when he had been entirely focused on staring Deidara down. Then Kisame had to lean toward him, looking for all the world like he didn't notice that his cloak was still hanging open, his tank top wrinkled from being shoved aside and then suddenly jerked back into place when their comrades came barging into their room, or the fact that there was a small spot on his neck that was an ever so faintly darker shade of blue that the rest of his skin. Itachi had had to crush an urge to smirk when he saw it. Then the shark man had spoken, just as if he didn't know his voice was still an enticing deep, husky tone, and shortly after Itachi realized that he was going to have to leave within the minute, before the tiny little voice still valiantly arguing for the virtue of common sense lost out to the rest of Itachi's thought process that was yelling at him to climb into his partner's lap and finish the job on that hickey regardless of the new audience. They were on sleep shift now, he reminded himself. Sleep shift, with twelve long hours to spend completely idle, and Kisame bedridden thanks to a certain accident from before...

He had dragged out the long walk downstairs, but somehow Itachi was still faced with an alarming problem outside the Leader's office when he finally came to a stop. Around the door as he stared from the opposite wall, he could see the outline of orange-yellow light peeking out from the inside, knew that he was expected and that the Leader had never been a patient man, nor himself a tardy one. Yet, Itachi couldn't go in so long as his heart beat continued to ring persistently in his ears, sounding remarkably to him like a mantra chanting, _"Sex...Sex...SEX..."_

Kisame was gay.

Kisame was gay, or Itachi was passed out somewhere in the base, having lost consciousness after that first kiss under the mistletoe caused every fiber of his body to wake up with an unbridled craving for a certain shark-like comrade. Either way, whether hallucination or reality, Itachi couldn't go into the Leader's office with a relentless erection still stubbornly waiting since the moment a ghostly light hand had teasingly landed there earlier. Itachi tried to think of something revolting to get it down (Where was Zetsu startling him out of his thoughts when he needed him?), thought longingly of his cloak, still lying on the kitchen table where he had left it earlier, and then was shaken out of his train of thought by the Leader thundering from inside his office that he could pick up Itachi's chakra density through the door.

Itachi had once spent three nights straight with a girl in the Water Country the year that he and Kisame were snowed in just outside Kiri. Looking back with something similar to bemusement from his predicament outside the office of the Akatsuki Leader, he thought that she was probably among the longest of his relationships, if he could indeed use that word to describe what he did with every female that attracted his attention during his experimentation period. He remembered her well enough, though not her name. She had been a strikingly beautiful creature; slender and ice pale, with an easy sense of humor that was both warm and slightly crude in the Water Country fashion. A bit like Kisame's when they first met. She had told him on the last of their three night fling, that he had the most adorable habit of blushing during sex. Itachi hadn't been aware of that before she told him, having never had the inclination to have sex in front of mirror. He supposed that it could be credited to the unusual pallor of his skin, though in retrospect, she had been just as pale. Whether the redness started some point closer to orgasm or was there from the very beginning, he wasn't sure. As far as he was concerned, extra heat in his face was an ignorable thing during carnal activities, and he certainly hadn't bothered to ask the girl when she took notice. She had only grinned at him in a remarkably similar way to Kisame when he shrugged off Itachi's glares, and the conversation portion of their night had ended. When Itachi opened the Leader's door and stepped into the light he had seen peering out at him from under the door in the present, he was a little worried that his face might have been a glowing red beacon, almost more so than he was about anything else that would be much more _prominent_ about announcing that his thoughts were currently still back in his bedroom, humping Kisame raw with their bedroom door still firmly locked and in place.

Itachi needn't have worried though. The moment he opened the door, he was confronted with the most horrifying sight he had ever seen in all his twenty one years, effectively killing off his boner with its sheer unexpected strike of terror.

The Leader's desk was clean. Completely swept bare, with the lamplight reflecting off the freshly polished wooden surface in a stark contrast to the normal tiny spot of free space that was usually there. On the floor, like the scene of a bloodless massacre, the Leader's army of papers was scattered in an unruly whirl of files and packets and crumpled documents. After opening the door, Itachi stood dumb and had to blink his eyes twice, and even activate his sharingan, before he could convince himself that no, the scene was not the product of a genjutsu being used against him, nor were there enemy nin hiding somewhere within the room.

The Leader was sitting calmly on his side of the desk, seeming to watch Itachi's reaction during the brief period when the Uchiha could barely do anything other than stretch the limits of how close he would allow himself to come to gaping. Beside the organization leader, a bottle of polish and an old rag were set out, and if it weren't for the calm, composed movements of his superior's hands as he cleaned the smooth surface of the desk, Itachi might have been startled into even believing for a moment that the organization leader had spontaneously gone blind and did not see that the papers so vital to his careful organizing had been relocated to the floor as if by a raving madman. After he had received an odd look from the more experienced shinobi however, and a pointed gesture toward the chair in front of the eerily empty desk, Itachi's shock was quickly overridden by another unusual emotion for him.

Outrage.

"You're _switching_ us?" Itachi echoed incredulously several minutes after entering the Leader's office, or as close to incredulous that Itachi allowed himself to sound.

Sitting unfazed across his open valley of polished wood, the Leader stared him down sternly. "Don't look at me like that, Itachi. It's just for the night," he said, frowning before he paused thoughtfully, probably noticing Itachi's unusually hollowed look of irrational disbelief, and then added curiously, "Unless there are any complaints?"

Itachi shook himself. Blinking away from the unnervingly different room that he was in, with that clean desk, wide as a king sized bed, completely devoid of papers, he return the Leader's look with a frown of his own and said, stiffly as he ever could, "Zetsu had me believe the point of this base station period was to make Tobi and Deidara learn to interact with _each other."_

"It is," the Leader confirmed easily. "But at the moment they are quite tired and cranky from their last mission, too much so for..."

There was a knock on the door, and the Leader cut himself off. At his call, the door opened and Kisame slipped inside. Itachi craned around in his chair to see him, surprised that he had missed the familiar chakra signature through the wood, and felt another urge to smirk jump up from seemingly nowhere that he had to crush. Kisame's hickey was carefully covered with the collar of his cloak.

"Shouldn't you be resting?" the Leader asked sharply before the shark nin was done displaying a much less subdued version of Itachi's initial surprise at the state of the office. Kisame seemed like he had to visibly shake himself away from the invitation to stare open-mouthed that the room offered. When he did, Itachi noticed his face change a little.

"I'm fine," Kisame answered back on what sounded suspiciously like a huff. "What did you want to see us about, Leader-sama?" He crossed the room while he answered, looking over the walls like Itachi had, but without the benefit of the sharingon to put his mind at ease about enemy nin and the like.

"Kisame, why are your sleeves wet?" the Leader asked with a frown as his Kiri agent took the chair beside Itachi.

Kisame hastily folded his arms. The action pulled down on the collar of his cloak. "No reason," he answered, though when Itachi glanced sidelong at him, the two ninja locked eyes. The Leader raised an eyebrow, but dismissed it.

"As I was saying, I would rather have Deidara and Tobi rested before we begin forcing them to interact. If possible, I'd rather avoid any messy incidents..." the Leader paused for a moment again, glancing at Kisame, then down toward the tinsel that had somehow managed to stay in place along the outer edges of the wide desk. Itachi didn't miss it, but the Leader gave no significant indication that the Uchiha understood.

Kisame blinked, having missed the earlier half of the announcement. "Are they taking over our sleep shift?"

Itachi remembered that he was supposed to be outraged.

The Leader answered Kisame calmly, "No. Kisame, your sleep shift with Tobi started precisely five minutes ago. Itachi is giving up his."

"I don't see why we don't simply let them take ours," Itachi intoned sharply, but knew even as he spoke that it was a redundant argument from the other ninja's expression.

The Leader smiled at him, a smile that hinted he had expected that question and had already prepared for it. He only answered however, "Because of recent discoveries Kisame's made in Tobi and Deidara's sleeping arrangements," he began.

Kisame butted in, "I never came down here to tell you about that."

The Leader pretended not to hear him. "...I'm changing the shifts around to ensure that both agents are fully rested by tomorrow. I repeat, Kisame, you are now sleeping with Tobi. Itachi, you are going to sleep with Deidara next shift. Are there any more questions?"

The Leader looked at them both with a particularly patient expression that made Itachi ever so uneasy. He glanced sidelong at Kisame, and found the shark nin frowning. Itachi lifted an eyebrow, temporarily distracted even from the slightest hint of a dark blue shape peeking over the rim of the other ninja's cloak, hoping to catch his partner's eye. Instead, Kisame's line of vision stayed focused on the desk and the Leader's polish rag, traveling up the Leader's arm until they rested on the other man's face. Itachi noted the entire exchange over the span of a fifteen second pause, still just as uncertain as to what the lax in conversation could be credited to. Then slowly, Kisame's frown melted into a grin reminiscent of a girl who was probably still living in a village just a little ways outside of the Hidden Mist. Without so much as a sidelong glance at Itachi to divulge whatever it was he found so entertaining, the shark nin said in an amused tone, "What happened to your desk?"

The Leader grinned right back. "Are there any other questions?"

Kisame started to chuckle. Itachi, looking between the two, could only frown. "No, nothing," he heard Kisame say beside him, and then he started to stand. The Leader motioned for Itachi to do so as well. He still didn't know what Kisame was laughing about, but neither of the two shinobi in the room seemed to be in any hurry to explain, even when he went so far as to ask. The Leader only motioned them toward the door, standing up to take a wide wipe over the center of his desk with the polish rag, and stopping Kisame at the door, similar to how he did Itachi at the end of his first visit to the office that night.

"Kisame," the Leader said with his dark head bowed toward the desk as he leaned over the surface. His sly smile was still visible in its reflection though. "If you see Zetsu, tell him to come back down here before he leaves. I just remembered something very important about his mission that I forgot to tell him earlier."

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It was quiet after Itachi and Kisame left the Leader's office. Once the door closed, Itachi had turned to ask just what the comment to the Leader had been all about, to which Kisame could only shrug and grin back at the disappointed glare his partner shot his way. Kisame and Itachi had worked this system out a long time ago. Kisame said no, and Itachi knew he would have to come up with a better strategy for getting his answer later anyway. Not that Kisame intended to tell Itachi then either, not when he didn't know whether Zetsu wanted to keep it a secret. He wondered whether Tobi even knew...

After turning down the hall, and Itachi's glare was lost in the dark shadows of the stony hall, the silence persisted, and Kisame thought, with a bit of an inward sigh, that the last twelve hours must have been weighing down on both of them. Particularly on Itachi, since the younger ninja was now facing another twelve without sleep. Briefly, the water ninja snuck a glance at his partner, walking uniformly at his side. It was more than a little surprising that Itachi hadn't thought of going back to the kitchen for his cloak, or even straightening his ponytail after he left their room a little less than half an hour ago. Looking at him now, he supposed it was probably for the better that he hadn't had a chance to sink his teeth into his partner's skin before their door was blown in—the

bedraggled hair and puffy lips were already enough to raise questions in the Leader's mind. Or possibly answer some. As if sensing Kisame's eyes on him, Itachi began fixing his hair as they walked, gathering up the long black strands that had been spilling out onto the pillow only a short while ago. Though, when exactly they managed to break free of their restraining ponytail was hard to recall. Kisame was sure that there were already a few tendrils free when they found their way onto the mattress. Maybe in the hallway, against the door. Or perhaps when they'd stopped at the corner after Itachi bit his tongue...

Any doubts that Kisame had about Itachi's sexuality had evaporated at some point back when his partner grabbed the front of his cloak and all but dragged him down the hallway toward their bedroom. Despite past evidence to the contrary.

Kisame was forced to break out of his musings, which regrettably, _were_ only musings about the trip down the hallway, when the sound of his partner's voice ended the prevailing silence between them.

"What happened with Deidara and Tobi?" Itachi said with a look to the side at the shark nin that guarded against another shrugged off answer.

"Fist fight," Kisame managed to answer after he pulled himself away from the memory, which was rather difficult to do with Itachi staring back at him. The other's skin was still pink from before. Itachi blinked coolly at him, wordlessly urging Kisame to add, "Deidara almost got Tobi's mask off."

The other made a sound that was just barely a snicker. "The Leader should have seen this coming when he partnered those two," he said when they turned a corner, and for a second Itachi's arm brushed against Kisame's. The shark nin levelly met his partner's eyes.

"Is that going off of Zetsu's prejudice theory or has something else convinced you?"

One corner of the Uchiha's mouth lifted in an almost smile that Kisame had come to recognize as the equivalent to the real thing over the years. "If Tobi does have a problem with Deidara's nationality," Itachi said, "he's more subtle than anyone in this organization. Deidara's the one causing the problems in their partnership, there's no doubt there."

Kisame snorted. "Really? I had no idea..."

They turned another corner, and again came close enough to brush arms. This time Kisame thought he felt an additional ghostly caressing of fingertips at the very edge of his sleeve, and couldn't help but notice in the dim lighting that Itachi's flush seemed to grow darker, though his face didn't betray any trace of embarrassment. "You should see their room," he said, still holding Itachi's eyes. He was beginning to get the faintest idea that he was babbling. "It's still littered with Sasori's things. I don't think Deidara's even thought about throwing anything out."

"He's going through insecurity." They reach the stairs and started up them without pause, Itachi first because his pace was ever so slightly brisker than his partner's. "As surprising as it is, Tobi is in the right."

Kisame snickered. He didn't look at Itachi's ass as they climbed up toward the dormitory hall, but he did grin secretly to himself when he noticed a slight change in his partner's gait that seemed to deliberately suggest that he do so. Itachi's head even turned a small fraction back to look at him, pretending to flex his neck while his fingers worked out some fictitious kink so that he could check to see if Kisame was taking advantage of the offered view.

No doubts remaining regarding Itachi's sexuality at all.

"If you're justifying Tobi's behavior, than you must be convinced," Kisame said while he fought to hide his smirk.

"Deidara should have been given more time to recover from Sasori's death." Itachi let go of his neck after his little glance over at Kisame and returned his vision to the stairwell in front of them.

"Or at least have been given some better instructions about what to do with Sasori's things," Kisame added.

"Mmhm."

Itachi stopped when he reached the top of the stairs. Kisame was only one behind. Hardly pausing between movements, the infamous Fire Country murderer swung around to face the stairwell, effectively blocking Kisame from exiting it as he those dark eyes locked onto his face.

"Where is Deidara?" Itachi demanded, face now very clearly red but his expression as stoic as the day he faced down four of the Leaf's prime jounin during their first failed kyuubi mission three years ago.

Kisame pondered the strange color more than he did the question. "Probably drying his hair out," he said, and saw one of Itachi's eyebrows go up almost unnoticeably, to which he just shrugged. He was proud that his face was as blank as his partner's when he did so.

"And Tobi?" Itachi went on prodding.

"Hiding his masks in Zetsu's room, I think."

"Good," Itachi said in what might have been a purr, but before Kisame could speculate as to whether or not he could label it that, his partner tugged down the side of his collar covering the right side of his neck and neatly latched on to the same spot that he had before Deidara and Tobi had come barreling into their room. Normally, Kisame was at least a head taller than his younger partner, and that particular part of his neck would have been uncomfortable for the Uchiha to reach while standing without pulling the shark nin down to his level, but with the height alteration from the step, Itachi reached it easily. It was hard not to shiver when those lips that had been on his mind all night skated into place, the loose strands of Itachi's bangs brushing against his cheek and the side of his throat. A hot tongue swept over the patch of skin before Itachi's teeth, and then his mouth settled over it, drawing it into his mouth while Kisame's breath hissed out.

"Itachi..."

Itachi went right on sucking the skin for another long moment. Long, because Kisame couldn't seem to convince any part of his body to respond other than to give a low moan into the strands of Itachi's hair as he turned his head. Itachi's weight pressed against him, pressuring him to reach out for the railing to his left and latch on for support. The fist clutching his collar gently guided his back to the stone. Cool air touched Kisame's neck when his partner finally chose to lift his head, but by then Kisame had nearly forgotten that he had even said the other's name. Mouth hovering over the spot, Itachi's breath fanned the worried, moist skin before his head slowly turned up. Kisame still couldn't see his partner's face when the feeling of soft, panting breath moved up to his ear, crossing the side of his cheek to reach it.

"I want you."

Kisame felt something in the lower half of his body jump at his partner's deep voice. The tip of Itachi's tongue thrummed along the sensitive edge of his outer gill, and Kisame couldn't fight it this time. He shivered.

Itachi's voice continued, "If I can't be subtle, than I'll be blunt. I want you. Tonight." He darted his tongue out again, teasing the same gill with the tip of his tongue while his previously unoccupied hand came to rest on Kisame's chest. "Right now."

Itachi's fingers began feeling a little less than gently for the buttons sewn in on the inside of the cloak. Troublesome decision in tailoring, Kisame thought; he didn't know why the Leader even thought about putting them on the inside of the cloak. Made taking it off take painfully longer.

He felt himself groaning as he snaked an arm around his partner's midsection, but if ever luck had existed, theirs was playing a game of cat and mouse with them tonight. Scarcely had Kisame even touched his partner before the sound of someone pointedly and loudly clearing their throat reached them.

Kisame froze first, eyes that had been just beginning to slip down to half mast from lack of use while Itachi stole his attention, snapped open with the promise that the next time this happened he was going to _kill _someone.

Itachi was slower to turn his head away to look for the interrupter, though the fist in Kisame's uniform clenched alarmingly tight in the fabric. His voice by Kisame's ear was only slightly angered as he whispered, "Meet me in the kitchen." Then he stepped back, and Kisame saw that black eyes had turned to red.

Itachi turned around, but Kisame was still the first one to respond. Stepping out from the stairwell, he swept the hallway with his eyes, expecting to find Deidara or Tobi standing by one of the doorways. However, the person he saw looking at him over his partner's shoulder was neither. Instead...

"Evening, Zetsu."

"Good evening Kisame. Itachi." Zetsu murmured quietly. He stood far enough away from the staircase so that Kisame couldn't tell whether he was embarrassed at interrupting them. Briefly, he wondered whether Zetsu had been standing there since they came up. Even in settings that his unusual appearance didn't lend itself to, Zetsu had always had a knack for going unnoticed by others, which Kisame admitted somewhat embarrassedly included himself and his comrades.

Itachi was less flustered. "Is there something that we can help you with?" he heard the smaller ninja asked stiffly. He had stepped to the side when Kisame had come up from the stairwell, no longer touching him, but his face still lingering between a deep pink and its usual pallor from his forehead to his collarbone.

"We were hoping that Kisame would not mind repeating where he thought Tobi might be. We are looking for him."

"Oh," Kisame said dumbly. Itachi did not give silence a chance to grow between the three though. As if he hadn't just been caught rubbing up against his partner of eleven years in the middle of the hallway, he stepped away from Kisame, crossed the hallway toward Zetsu. "He's probably in one of these rooms. Kisame can help you find him," he said, voice completely detached from the rosy color of his blank face. Then he passed the Grass nin, walking down the hall in the direction of the kitchen, and leaving Kisame wondering just how long he would have to wait for Tobi to go to sleep.

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Hello! Well, his is thus far the first update that hasn't taken me the better part of a month since part two. Hurray for me! Now if only I could say the same for part five, but unfortuantely that just wouldn't be true. That one I'm a bit reluctant to put a due date on given the stage it's currently in now, but I'm hoping for...some time after the nineth maybe? I'm going to have to change my profile again. Sorry guys, my school still has one more month to go before I'm free to write fics all day long if I so choose. In the mean time...look! Horny Itachi! That's gotta count for something, right?

Heh, and also, since I haven't done them for this story yet, and this installment is rather short, I decided to do some review responces. : ) Here they are:

**yllom21 **I'm really glad that you're enjoying this story so far, but I'm sorry to tell you that Tobi's face wont be described in this story. Too likely it wouldn't coincided with the manga. ;

**toki-kun **lol. Thanks!

**Smoking Panda **Hope that this little slip of an update satisfies you for now. It's been forever! I hope you're doing okay: )

**Kaname Natsumi **My lord, you get the award for the longest review this story has gotten so far! (And that's a very good thing, makes me smile like an insane fangirl imagining Kisame and Itachi hopping in bed on Christmas. Oh wait...) Personally I was never able to really get into Sasori and Deidara as a couple (I think it's because such a large part of my heart belongs to OroSas, hee), I do see how it would work though, which is why I let the hinting slip in with this story. And I see Dei-dei's reasoning completely. Nearly broke my heart when Sasori died, of course he would hoard his stuff. Who wouldn't? Other than Tobi, who is now battling a ghost for closet space, that is. The hints toward DeiTobi were a little intentional (I like think of Deidara as a seme, and Tobi's the perfect candidate for his uke :3), but ZetsuTobi wasn't, though I clearly see where it would come from (and as a fan of that pairings, will not bother to disperse it, of course). Aw! Thank you! Though I have to tell you that if you think I'm the best, you're missing out on an AMAZING couple of stories! Have you ever read Nights in White Satin? or 37? Those are currently on my favorites list for KisaIta stories. :D One is so romantic, and then other's characterization is so DEAD ON, you wont beleive it! Make me look like a child, they do. (Though that does not mean stop praising me by any means, hee!) You liked IiB? Than you! To this day that is still one of my favorite works! I never get tried of hearing that people enjoyed reading it. ;) Though of course, this current story is written in a bit cruder of a style (my Itachi muse wanted to get laid. Badly.) Yeah...Itachi did the nasty with old Oro, and loved every minute of it up until he woke up sober, I think. You have to admit, that tongue would be an amazing asset... Yes, Kisame fainted because he is a WUSS! lol Poor man was scarred for life. You would be too. He saw holly where holly should never be. The thought of having tears in Deidara and Tobi's confrontation did cross my mind, but I decided to hold that off for a little while longer. Wait until next chapter, there's a scene in there that I think that you might like, but unfortunately, that's as much as I can say. :) You thought that was a short break between updates? Well, I guess by my standards it was too. But you should look at the start and finish dates on some of my other fics! They're enough to make me (and my lazy arse) ashamed. Glad that you find my contribution to the meager KisaIta fandom up to parr, sister! Tryin' my best to lure in more members. ;D

**Azamiko** You know, that's just what my muses were telling me. Someone in this story is reeking of denial, and he's nursing a bruised jaw, methinks.

**Black Ice **Hey! Ah, aff...I remember those days. Ever since they had the site reconstructed, it hasn't accepted my files. It's really been a bummer. I've been meaning to put a link or something there for awhile now... All well. I'm glad that you took the time to find me and sniff around my newer works. :D The Zetsu mistake should be fixed as soon as I finish posting this chapter. Thank you for letting me know about it!

**Taiy-Chan **Yes, yes they do keep getting interrupted. Damn comrades... Hee, thank you for your compliments! Tobi's face might be making another appearance, I'm not quite sure yet. But if it does, I'll probably be very vague on the details, I wouldn't want to write something that turned out to be completely different from the manga (just ignore the fact that I'm already taking that risk by supporting my Obito theory, heh.)

**just a rambling romantic **It's okay, nobody will judge. XD (Sir Leader's got a wonky sense of humor.)

**Nekotsume **ItaKisa indeed. Itachi's a very aggressive uke. ;) Well, the Zetsu and Leader closeness I can explain easily enough. I always had a bit of a soft spot for them as a crack couple, but knew that I would probably never get around to writing a story for them. It wasn't in the original drafting for the story, but somehow it got into the story. No regrets. :) The drinking now...I can't touch on that just yet. There's a part in the next chapter that might explain that a little on its own, and I wouldn't want to ruin that scene. And Kisame...well, that part I'll admit didn't have any art in it. I wanted to separate this story from LaM's layout a little by having everything out in the open rather than taking place behind the scenes, at least on Kisame's part. At this point in the story, Itachi still largely believes that no one else in the base knows other than Zetsu. That'll make for some interesting conversation after everything is all wrapped up.

**Rayven** I wonder. XD Thanks!

Sorry about any typos. It's rather late at the moment. But of course, feel free to point them out as always so that I can change them. :) Goodnight, friends.


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